It’s been a turbulent week for me, k-dreamers. On top of schoolwork and still trying to submit my portfolio for the School of Contemporary Arts, I haven’t liked as many kpop songs this year. No wonder I’ve been burnt out. I don’t have enough songs to get me through these tough times. Hopefully things are turning around soon because I liked a whopping 5 songs this week! One of those songs is “Love Cut” by CNBLUE. Let’s check out this release!
CNBLUE playfully change up the rhythm in this song.
You can definitely tell from the music video that they were going for a fun vibe for this comeback. That playfulness shows itself in the music as well. Yong Hwa sings on beat at first, but for the prechorus, the rhythm of his singing turns into triplets. This sets up the bridge to be in a swung rhythm. When you divide one beat into three, you get a triplet. Then, if you draw out the first beat in the triplet and leave out the second beat in the triplet, you get a swung rhythm. You might even find your hand swinging in a U shape during that rhythm. In additions to that swung rhythm in the bridge, the tempo of the bridge is slower than the rest of the song to add to that dramatic effect.
Don’t you just love when songs include whistling?
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then you know what sounds I like to hear in the instrumental of a song. We start by hearing whistling and acoustic guitars in “Love Cut”. The song swaps out those sounds for a fast-paced bass guitar and a drum kit. And then the instrumentals change again to include a staccato piano. They even add brass to chorus and those instruments get a short spotlight during the outro. All these changes to the soundscape kept my ears perking up throughout the song.
Honourable Mentions: CL – Tie A Cherry, IU – strawberry moon, Kingdom – Black Crown, Davichi – First Loss, HYNN – To You (You can tell “To You” is produced by Jung Key because of the dramatic key change at the end.)
If you like this song, check out: gugudan SEMINA – SEMINA (2018), Hwasa – Twit (2019), WOODZ – Love Me Harder (2020)
Funny story: I was searching for “Love Cut” on YouTube and I noticed that CNBLUE make a lot of songs that begin with the word “Love”. Was this your favourite CNBLUE love song? Let me know in the comments!