Don't Let Anyone Hold You Back // Composer Reacts to LUCY - So What

[00:00:01]Hello and welcome back to another episode of Critical Reactions with your host Brian. We're going to wrap up today with a special selection which is where one of you tell me exactly what it is I need to check out.

[00:00:15]Today's comes out of this from Childra.

[00:00:18]A Korean band that is somewhat similar to The Action Hero's yet different.

[00:00:23]We're going to be looking at the group Lucy. The song we're looking at is called So What. We do have English lyrics up here as well as color-coded lyrics based on who's singing them.

[00:00:36]I see that three of the four people listed have vocal parts. We also have guitar, bass, drums, and violin, which is very cool. Nice to hear a violin in here. I'm going to assume this is pop rock, maybe K-rock. Um let's dive in. See what Lucy has in store for us today.

[00:01:04]>> [music] [music] >> Ooh, I love that little guitar harmony on the end of that line.

[00:01:20]>> [music] [music] >> The guitars playing the same line.

[00:01:36]>> [music] [music] >> That triad of the two vocalists and the violin >> [music] >> So positive, so uplifting.

[00:01:59]>> [music] [music] >> What the violin counterpoint against the vocals?

[00:02:12]>> [music] [music] >> Yeah.

[00:02:32]>> [music] >> What is this the pre-chorus?

[00:02:39]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Okay.

[00:03:05]>> [music] >> Is that the pre-chorus now then? Very driving.

[00:03:15]>> [music] >> The violin just holding over here while the guitar is going.

[00:03:26]Violin taking over.

[00:03:32]>> [music] >> So a variation on the chorus here.

[00:03:53]>> [music] [music] >> Slightly classical leaning with some of these note choices.

[00:04:04]>> [music] >> The core falling back into the rock sound.

[00:04:08]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Yeah, that's a fun little uh mathcore adjacent transition there that we heard.

[00:04:57]Very fun metric modulation there while also increasing intensity, which I thought was a cool way to build back up into uh the final push on this track. Kind of interesting to end on that as well, but I suppose it is a peak.

[00:05:12]Why not end on it?

[00:05:14]Very fun uplifting power pop rock though. Um incredibly positive, incredibly optimistic. Everything about this feels like soaring through the air.

[00:05:29]But it's also incredibly catchy, too. It isn't just the optimism, it's sort of a light leaning towards a punky drum work.

[00:05:38]Lots of syncopation using the bass kick against a two-four snare.

[00:05:43]Um yeah, it's very syncopated though.

[00:05:46]Incredibly, just really pushing forward with momentum on the drums consistently, and I think that energy is persistent throughout most of the track, even in the the less momentous verse. We kind of bring the energy down a little bit. There's still so much drive to get through it.

[00:06:04]Not necess- Maybe not necessarily get through the section, but probably tying into themes of pushing forward, no matter what.

[00:06:14]Of always taking that next step. That's what I get out of this song emotionally, atmospherically, thematically. It's always about taking that next step.

[00:06:26]Um and I think that having the punky drums and the overly positive uh melodic writing for the the guitars and bass absolutely sells that.

[00:06:39]Now, one thing I really need to commend them on is melody writing. And And not just any individual melody. There are certainly some cool violin parts in here, some cool guitar parts.

[00:06:51]Uh the vocals, of course, they take lead melody in a lot of places, but it's actually the way that all three of these work together.

[00:06:59]The bass pretty much holds the low end of this with these moving baselines. It is harmonic, it is rhythmic, but it's also sort of melodic on its own right, too. It's just this constant moving force underneath everything.

[00:07:14]Almost like your legs. If your intention is to just always take that next step, no matter what, the bass are the legs.

[00:07:22]They're just always taking that next step.

[00:07:27]But, the way that everything else works is that the bass is holding down the fort. They're the foundation. Nobody else really needs to lean into that.

[00:07:35]They do, of course. They help supplement it at times. In the chorus, the guitar does a really great job of just being a rhythm guitar there, laying down some chords for the vocals and violin to work together on. And that's sort of one of the first things I want to talk about here is not just how any one individual melody works, but the tandem melody counterpoint or counter melody where two melodies are existing simultaneously.

[00:08:01]I absolutely love the way that the violin and the vocals work around each other in the chorus. It sounds phenomenal.

[00:08:12]Two intertwining stars not doing the same thing, but being participants in the same dance.

[00:08:18]It is incredibly infectious to listen to the two of these instruments. And I'd even say that texture-wise, timbre-wise, the way that these two instruments sound together is phenomenal. They're just both EQ'd and mixed in a way that sounds great to hear them together. And then the composition, the two melodies uh you know, at their heart, what actually the notes are, sound great together, too. And it just gets smashed together into this beautiful marriage of composition and production.

[00:08:50]But there's also a a passing of the baton as well.

[00:08:54]Uh you can really hear this towards the end of the track. In uh the final chorus, I believe it is, we have the vocal line being held out. And then, as that's being held out, the final vocal line, the guitar comes in from under that and picks up pretty much around that same pitch. I don't think it was the same note, but it definitely was one adjacent to it. And it almost felt as if the vocal melody became a guitar melody.

[00:09:20]We actually hear this all throughout this track of one instrument passing the melody to another instrument. And there was one section where the vocals went to the violin, went to the guitar, and it felt like one seamless idea presented by, you you trading off every eight bars or something like that.

[00:09:38]And it was just absolutely wonderful.

[00:09:41]Nothing in this feels stilted or jagged.

[00:09:44]Everything feels interconnected and I really think a lot of that comes down to the way that the melody is written, passed around between instruments. So, even though the chorus has ended, it doesn't feel like we finished a section.

[00:09:57]While this track certainly has a verse chorus identity to it, although kind of gets weird on the second verse, which is, as far as I can tell, just the pre-chorus.

[00:10:09]Um but we still have, you know, an idea and then a chorus, then an idea, then a chorus, then a bridge, then a chorus.

[00:10:15]Pretty close to the ABABCB pattern that is prevalent through a lot of pop music. Um so, even though we can neatly chop this track up into segments, it never really feels chopped up.

[00:10:27]Everything feels continuous.

[00:10:31]And that is one thing that I love about the way this is all presented. Not just the composition, but also the production of allowing these instruments to have their own identities, but be close enough in the way that they're tuned and EQ'd and mixed so that they could just say, "Hey, I'm done playing. Someone else take this spot." And then those pick up from a note generally next to it and continue the melody on.

[00:10:56]There is also, of course, the harmony in here. We have some vocal harmonies at the beginning, which sound great, and then texture layering, where we have uh two different instruments uh playing the same part.

[00:11:08]We get the harmony from that, but also the texture layering of an electric guitar and a vocal or a violin and some vocals. And so, that's always great, too. And there's just a lot of ways that the melody is worked around in this track to create something that just sounds great to the ears.

[00:11:29]And I think that's about going to wrap it up.

[00:11:33]We're going to dive into the lyrics, of course, but I mean we touched on how great the vocals are.

[00:11:38]All the different vocalists on this harmony, counterpoint, uh the fantastic melodic writing, the punky movement underneath, and the forward momentum present throughout all of this track that accompanies a very positive feeling overall.

[00:11:53]The only thing that's really interesting left in this track is still the second verse, which feels uh the first verse was uh the main vocalist, and then we had the bassist and drummer do a harmonized part, which to me felt like a pre-chorus. It geared us up to go into the chorus.

[00:12:13]But after the chorus, we got a little instrumental bit, and then it was the bassist and drummer doing their harmonized part again. It's like we skipped the second verse and went right back to the chorus. I don't think that was paced extremely well.

[00:12:29]I already find choruses, especially like this, where we are going to hear it four times, to kind of drain on me a little bit, and to basically have very little I think there was like 30 seconds between the first and second choruses, not usually my favorite idea structurally. I did enjoy how, coming out of the bridge, we had a reduced variant of the chorus.

[00:12:52]Uh I don't think it was acoustic, but it was a clean electric guitar and the vocals, and that was it. The vocals were airier, more of a uh mixed ch- uh chest and head more so than the full chest sound that they've been using, and so we got a lighter variant of it, and then that pushed into the full chorus. That's always great. I'm a sucker for that variation right there.

[00:13:15]But we do end up hearing the chorus four times in 3 minutes, which kind of crazy to me. So, that I think that's the only blemish I really have to say about this track, and it's not a big one.

[00:13:32]I still quite enjoyed my time with it, but it is I I think it's one of those areas where I'm just not always the key audience for pop music because choruses are just so important to a lot of pop music, and I I just don't always feel that way. I I love a repeated segment, something to be familiar with.

[00:13:55]It shouldn't You shouldn't hear it the same number of times as the number of minutes in your music, though. Once every minute is ridiculous to hear a concept uh on average, anyways.

[00:14:06]Uh let's hit some lyrics on this one, and we'll see what's going on there.

[00:14:11]This is a track about moving on and not regretting who you were.

[00:14:19]The first stanza, which is the only verse in this whole track, I called that musically we didn't we didn't really have a second verse, but uh lyrically we didn't it either.

[00:14:29]It says bitter memories wake me up. I see my regretful self in front of my eyes.

[00:14:35]The way I interpret that, my regretful self is a person who I regret being.

[00:14:44]It says I see them so clearly, boiling and flickering.

[00:14:49]Pleasure doesn't last forever, so that means this pain won't last too long, either.

[00:14:55]It's a feeling of wishing you'd done things better, wishing that the past had been different, that you had made different decisions. You just regret who you have been, and you feel bad about that, but you got to push on.

[00:15:12]This pain, this regret that you have, it will pass.

[00:15:17]The chorus says, "Leave it. Let it explode. The present's the only time that we need to worry about. I fell because it was my first time on this path.

[00:15:28]I really like that idea.

[00:15:31]You know, we always talk about in more Western lingo, it's you know, get back up on the horse.

[00:15:38]The idea that falling down means you just got to pick yourself back up.

[00:15:43]And that's what he's saying right here.

[00:15:44]He's this is the first time I've lived this. Maybe this version of myself, this this concept. This is the first time that I've done this thing. Maybe it's a new task. Maybe it's a new era of your life, a new chapter, whatever. So, since this is the first time I've done it, of course I was going to fail. So what?

[00:16:06]You just get back up.

[00:16:08]He says you got to fill it with blood, sweat, and tears. You got to put the effort into it.

[00:16:15]Failure is part of the learning process.

[00:16:18]He says, you may call it stupid, but don't be ridiculous.

[00:16:21]Watch over us shining bright.

[00:16:25]If you want to be an onlooker, that's fine. But we're not going to diminish our light because you don't think what we're doing is worthwhile. We're reinventing ourselves. We're going down a path we've never been before. We're not going to sit around and stagnate.

[00:16:44]A lot of this reminds me of a song that I hold really dear to my heart that I have showcased on the channel previously called Polaris by The Human Abstract, which is a song about never resting on your laurels. The opening lines is I'm not afraid to say that I take pride in burning all of my epitaphs.

[00:17:06]I don't care that I destroy the things of my past. I'm always moving forward.

[00:17:11]You have to keep changing.

[00:17:15]Do not become stale. That's what this song is saying. You can regret what you've done in the past, but do not let that hold you back.

[00:17:23]You got to keep taking those steps forward.

[00:17:29]After that, we hit the pre-chorus again. We hit the chorus again. There's some shouting of believe in believe in us.

[00:17:37]There's a section that says that they understand this isn't the easiest path.

[00:17:43]But you can't tell me that you know the right way either. We have to carve our own way through this world. You can't give up. Wounds eventually heal. Then we hit the chorus once again.

[00:17:59]Absolutely phenomenal message. And I love the positivity it's paired with in this track.

[00:18:08]Yeah. Just great all around. High energy, positive message.

[00:18:14]Fun song. I'm down for it. If you all want to suggest more Lucy, I'm I'm up for that. This sounded great.

[00:18:23]These are my thoughts on Lucy's So What.

[00:18:25]Let me know what you thought of this, if there's anything that you'd like to add on to what I said, or correct me on if you have your own take, perspective, or opinion on this song.

[00:18:34]Let me know. Put all of that, as well as anything else you'd like to add, into the comment section below. Above that, in the description box, you'll find a link to Linktree. Takes you here. You can find links to my music, ways to support the channel, a link to the Discord server, and so much more. Above that, if you could like, subscribe, and ring the bell, I greatly appreciate all three of those. I'll be back tomorrow 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 9:00 p.m. UTC, as usual. Until next time, remember to be critical, not cynical, of the music you listen to, and have a fantastic morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever you choose to watch my videos.

[00:19:21]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Mhm.