BLACKPINK

BORN PINK

On their second album, the group marry the very best of Western pop music – outrageous middle eights, universal emotions, enormous choruses – with a romantic, gleefully chaotic South Korean sensibility.

BORN PINK is a nice breath of fresh air in the cluttered pop music landscape. Much of this is owed to the touches each of the band members bring to their songs and the immaculate production behind it all.

You can hear what it takes to “activate” a multi-100 million dollar project: absolute purity of intent, sonics and engineering that make Lady Gaga sound like a home recorded indie kid, the barrage of all those styles boiled up together and sugar-rush pop intensity from start to end.

It would be interesting to toggle the single material a bit ... because those are biggest flaws here and don’t really reflect all the group is about.

With its limited scope of musical conceptions, Born Pink, therefore, sounds strangely restricted, as if detained in a confined space wherein it longs to escape. Hopefully, though, Blackpink will be able to do so after this record.

With only eight songs on the tracklist, it’s refreshingly concise. But with the lack of invention on display, eight songs is probably quite enough.