We've seen a lot of the sexy smoothe femme fatale concept lately and I'm honestly getting pretty tired of it. (The boys have been wearing out the grungy gangster look too, so I can assure you that it's not that I have a double standard, I promise). HyoSung does it very well though, clearly. She's absolutely gorgeous and this MV pays glorious homage to her incredible body. The styling is fantastic and there's no end to the eye-candy. She's glam and gorgeous here, and everything strong and feminine. The choreography is sexy and slick and absolutely fabulous, there's glam shots for the camera but no simple pandering, plays off the lyrics without a sense of stiffness, and it's it's dynamic and engaging. It's certainly some of my favorite female choreo so far in 2014.

The track wasn't my favorite right off the bat. I appreciated the throw to the classic lullaby, but it took a few listens for me to really come to enjoy it. The energy of the track is infectious, though, and I couldn't stay frosty towards it for long. It doesn't really evolve as it goes, but there are several distinct sections that at least give the feel of ongoing progress to the track. And the bridge before the final chorus gives a sense of relative destination to the journey, so while nothing dramatically profound, it still feels complete and satisfying. Her singing skills compliment the choreography that highlights her gorgeous curves and Goodnight Kiss is a great track. It's an earworm that hearkens back to an old lullaby with so much energy that it makes you feel anything but sleepy. The fantasy elements of the video and the elegant innuendo of the lyrics add up to a fantastic release!

            Absolutely fantastic! This MV is a wild ride of deep psychology. The imagery we get, right from the beginning is spectacular. The barren wasteland, the dreamlike color desaturation, the exhausted runner . . . all classic representations of a strung-out lover chasing after a lost dream. It's especially catching when combined with the dollhouse imagery and the mirrors & glass and the film vs reality depictions. It's incredibly hard to tell what is a flashback and what is a fantasy in this MV and that's what makes it truly special: I'm fairly certain that the relationship being mourned as love lost never really happened.
            Think about it. The barren wasteland is our first image, and it's followed up quickly by the dollhouse (classic metaphor of a fantasy perfect-life). Then we see the boys inside the house, but again note that it's only after the dollhouse image. As put in terms of Sherlock references, this is most likely a psychological organizing system fandom knows as a 'mind-palace'. It's pieces of memory sewn together to create a semi-physical space, in this case a dollhouse that manipulates the real memories into a romance that never happened. The photos and film bits are all real memories, brought in from the outside, but the fuzzy flashbacks (like the carousel scene) are all fabrications. The use of specific colors and saturation levels gives the whole MV a very dream-like quality while still managing to delineate between scenes and compartments of reality perfectly. The mirrors and glass are prismatic reflections of the self, the girl shown there is only the notion of her as it exists within the Self of the narrator.
            Having defined himself through his relationship with this girl, the narrator is completely unable to function without her. She might not have even dumped him, or realized that he liked her at all. And yet his obsessive fiction of his involvement in her live has led to a reality that can't carry on without her presence (we're talking less kid with an imaginary friend and more like a Schizoid social-cognitive disruption resulting in a detailed paracosm). My headcanon is that the girl is from a higher grade level, who tutored him regularly, and just graduated without him, moving on with her life, and he's having a psychotic break in lieu of her presence.
            It's really a fascinating look at the psychological process of grief and paracosmic fictions. He goes from longing to be with her again, blaming himself for her absence and wishing he could have been better to make her stay, to blaming her for deceiving him. During this section, we see the hourglass for the first time; indicating that a deadline had been put on the relationship from the very beginning. He blames her for his inability to move on, recognizing that this cyclical obsession is in fact a problem that needs to be addressed. And in killing the Self of mirrors (and the self IN the mirrors of the dollhouse), he's breaking out of this obsessive fiction. Now, it's hard to tell if he successfully moves on, but I'd guess that the cricket sounds in the end are an indication that he's lived through killing his unconscious and has perhaps woken up in the middle of the night and this whole encounter has been one long, revelation-in-a-dream and now he can move on properly. The last we see of the hour glass has a little bit of sand left in it, so maybe he gets to see her off properly and mourn her stepping out of his life in a healthy manner? It's all speculation from the moment Himchan pulls the trigger.
            It follows the pattern for One Shot almost exactly (discounting One Shot's alternate ending). This MV is a deeply emotional experience, rooted in psychology, and ending with a death. Like One Shot's MV, there's an emotional reversal on the bridge, triggered quite successfully by the slide into a different track off the album (for One Shot it was Coma and for 1004 (Angel)  the bridge brings in part of Save Me as the emotional-turn trigger). The choreography is kickin' and contributes well to the story, being blocky and rough and very visceral, in close contact with the earth and physicality; and most importantly full of fantasy elements (air-guitar and mirror-motions and such). The song itself is pretty fantastic on it's own; the beautiful slide of the acoustic (and the grunge-y reverb on the footsteps) into electric guitar, the elegant leaps from melody to rap and the tension of being halfway in-between. It moves well and evolves and is all around a lovely piece of work.
            The only drawback whatsoever is that there's no fully active story line. If we take it as an series of events occurring in a dream that he wakes up from (purely speculation) then it has some active plot, and certainly I'll not be one to undervalue the idea of having an active plot take place entirely in the narrator's mind (as the thoughts and thought-patterns do shift and evolve), but it's still not quite enough to be a fully fleshed plotline.

        From the teasers, I was super-psyched about this release. Coffee Shop was meh, and Hurricane was actively awful. Badman looked like it was going to be B.A.P's killer return to the spotlight. I was hoping that the first two singles were just little warm-ups designed to set a few low bars that they could use to vault up to unimaginable heights. And . . . they weren't. Well, maybe they were meant to be, but that's not how it worked out.

        From the production team promising that it was better than One Shot to the stylistic similarities to BigBang's Fanastic Baby, it could have been incredible. I went into it hoping that it would be, and I came out utterly convinced it wasn't. The good news is that it's not as bad as I first thought it to be, that was mainly just acute disappointment. That's not to say it's very good, but it's at least not bad.

        I like how it managed to expand their vocal-styles. The intro is actually quite fantasic, that smoothe and low-tone R&B. YongGuk's rap is spectacular as always, and the double tracking on certain lines is great. Harmonically this son is quite lovely, and melodically the verses are fantastic. The raps, as fun and good as they are, just feel unnecessary. The chorus has a nice feeling to it, the harmonic swirl there is lovely, and some of the background vocals were great in all the ways I was hoping for, but the main vocals are lifted so high above the bass that it's just hollow. The typical, overwhelming, breathtaking drop of the B.A.P chorus is entirely lacking. And the song has some of the same genre hashup issues that Hurricane had. Some of the musical transitions are just  . . . rough is a kind word for some of them.

        The dance break felt entirely unnecessary as the choreography in it was meh in terms of eyegrabbing uniqueness and downright blah in terms of drama. One Shot's choreographic climax played into the song and the action of the story, the climax here is . . . just a bit more of the same choreo they've been running. There were a few powerful moves and more than a few that dripped with sex appeal, but the video really didn't showcase them well.

        And as for the video . . . the styling was weird. The stripes seemed to be some sort of cartoon-ish allusion to prison clothes, the face paint didn't have any thematic relevance, the individual outfits were all over the place linked only by the repetition of black and white. The settings were all gorgeous and I'd love to see more videos shot there.

        But the MV really had no story. B.A.P was not involved with any of the events that led up to the all out war. The gangsters were ridiculously stereotypical, they had no obvious motivations, there was no thread of continuity to follow. It was a disaster. The cuts and video timings were really well done, but they didn't do enough to generate a story. There was nothing in it and all in all I feel that it was almost as much of a video failure as Hurricane.

         There really just isn't a good story. Sure, there's social commentary, but really, if you're making music without social commentary, you're not really making music . . . it's part of the human condition. And while this MV does have some social commentary, it's very generalized. The lyrics are just as vague as the visual, there's no acute pain, no intrinsic anguish. There's a show of the fact that the world is dark and chaotic (in both lyrics and visuals), there's a guided assumption that it's bad that the world is dark and chaotic and unkind, but there's no display of why it HURTS. Chaos, bad guys, blah blah blah, there's nothing that stabs at your very soul, that makes you question right and wrong. They've done it before with One Shot, and YongGuk did it even earlier with I Remember, they could have done it again, but they just didn't . . . and that's sad.

        Factoring in the song, I'd give this release an upper-middling score, probably a 6, the song alone a high 7. But the MV on it's own? It's not scoring very high.

Straight up, this is not my favorite B.A.P release. I suppose expecting something as epically fantastic as One Shot would lead anyone to frown at what's been served up, but even so, this release is really sub-par for them. They were Rookies of the Year last year for a damn good reason and One Shot proved they deserved it. Coffee Shop was meh, but I've gotten used to their pattern of Epic->Okay->Epic, so I was expecting Epic. I did not receive Epic.

The main beat rides well, it feels like it could easily measure up, but the track never really takes off. The MVs cuts follow the intro well, increasing the hopeful anticipation, but it also reveals all the styling for this round of promotions . . . styling that I am none too fond of. The Gold Outfits are cool, and the Suits are fabulous, but sweaters . . . yeah, not a fan. Once the verse kicks in (and the suits are shown in full glory), it really feels like Hurricane could be fantastic: the Verse is really quite fabulous, there's great meter-play, interesting melodic movement, fantastic harmonic stretch, and vocal transitions timed perfectly to generate interest. And then the chorus comes up . . . and it's boring. The little break down has zero vocal interest, and the melodic flutter that follows is really just there without demanding attention or releasing tension or anything at all . . . and then the "the roof is on fire bit" ... not a fan. First of all, it's terribly over used. And secondly, I thought they were saying the 'Louvre' (they're in Vegas after all, there's a mock up there). I actually preferred 'the Louvre', because it was funny. As an over used idiom . . . it's pretty blah. The dance break was entirely unnecessary. It breaks the flow of the song and disrupts it for no good reason, the whole MV has been showing off that they can dance, we get the idea. I will say that the "turn it up" accellerando bit was pretty cool, but it's not enough to warrant the dance break.

As a whole, the MV is meh. It's just flash and some dance moves, no real elegance in its design. Some of the cuts are skillfully done, but the flashing between day and night was just tragic. It could have been used thematically, to induce a greater sense of time-gap and drama. The MV that first comes to my mind that utilizes that same concept is Hyuna's BubblePop. I think Infinite's done it once or twice as well. But really, it could have been awesome. And instead it's just . . . blah.

In short, I'm not a fan of this release, not at all.