Mental Illness Friday over on Poptimists: IU THE STORY ONLY I DIDN'T KNOW (나만 몰랐던 이야기)

[koganbot]

"Today my body is acting strange, as if it doesn't belong to me." Returning to the locked ward, we present IU's new video, "The Story Only I Didn't Know":

Click to view

The major aesthetic question is can even a singer as sensitive as IU get me to like ballads, the answer here being, "Well, she did this time, but she doesn't always

Comments

[koganbot]

And if you didn't see it, there was actually a substantive discussion of last week's track (BEG's "Abracadabra") over on poptimists (though it was just me and Mat):

http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/799136.html

[askbask]

A nice performance of this

A suitably dramatic performance of 'Cruel Fairy Tale'

The other day, on stage with Corinne Bailey Rae

[askbask]

'Soribada, an online music service, combined the music downloads and streams from January 1st to March 30th to announce ‘Soribada’s 2011 First Quarter Top 10 Korean Gayo (pop song)’. Reinforcing her current popularity, IU held 3 of the top 10 spots.

According to the chart, IU’s song, “Good Day” was the number one song of the first quarter. Not only this, but the song “Someday” from KBS’s “Dream High” OST and her ballad “The Story Only I Didn’t Know” placed 4th and 7th, respectively - showing that IU is the trend of the first quarter.'

By the way, this 'Someday' is the first released song she's written and composed
herself. (For this Glee-like drama series. Don't know how much that put a damper on her own personality coming through.)

[askbask]

Turns out I'm wrong. She did write and release a song for 'Dream High', but it's not Someday, it's this:

- which I like a lot more!

[askbask]

A rather nice live band performance last week:

And a cover of a song many youtube users like, but I've never heard before:

name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uai1R_Wsxro

[askbask]

[koganbot]

Here's the original, by A Fine Frenzy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_S_TbD1XFM&ob=av2n

She (Alison Sudol) has a fine voice, much stronger than IU's, but by the end of the song she feels like a generic alt-singer-songwriter, Starbucks division, the voice plaintive and mildly burnt. Song did fairly well in Central Europe, and made a dent on the American adult contemporary chart.

IU's version doesn't start off as expressive, but it keeps going steadily, the drama maybe being whether her breath control will outlast the song, but she lets the song build its own drama, without trying to force the issue with her singing. So her not going for so much obvious emotion actually serves the song better.

Have the same feeling about IU that I have towards Dia Frampton and Xenia, the two best singers this year on The Voice: their voices are interesting enough to surmount their ingrained "tastefulness." Xenia could probably do a good version of "Almost Lover," if

[askbask]

IU seems to have a fondness for some potentially/probably generic alt-singer-songwriters. I've enjoyed most of her covers of such people but the big question is what she'll do on her own. I assume there will be some 'tastefulness' in her compositions as well, but that's not a problem on its own. In an interview she said she didn't want to write 'cliched' songs but I don't know what a songwriting cliché is to her. Her covers of k-pop hits had a sharpness to them, a clever wit - that's what I hope shows up.