Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
If you’re like me, then you basically had no idea who N-SONIC was prior to this article (*Searches Articles Database* *Zero Results* Yup), but they’ve earned my attention with “Excalibur“, which is worth a listen just for the percussion alone.
It’s not that N-SONIC’s use of drums on “Excalibur” is anything complicated or revolutionary, as it instantly reminded me of Kanye West‘s “Black Skinhead” and even Marilyn Manson‘s “The Beautiful People“, but I immediately took a liking to it because I had not heard this sound utilized all that much in recent memory within the realm of K-pop.
The two songs that this instrumental reminded me of had music videos that looked like this…
…so I enjoyed watching how N-SONIC made the instrumental work within the bounds of K-pop, which is considerably less accepting of concepts that push the envelope. But they did manage to execute it well, using adequate rapping that didn’t fall out of flow and quality falsetto vocals to take some of the edge off. My favorite part was the choral chanting in the post-chorus that reminded me of something you’d hear at a soccer/football match like The White Stripes‘ “Seven Nation Army“.
One of the things I do wish turned out better was the actual choreography, which I thought given the instrumental could’ve gone a lot harder than it did. Since the music video released was the dance version, I was expecting something that could keep up with the instrumental but was left a bit disappointed by it.
Still, I’m a sucker for these types of instrumentals as it is, so whether they danced to it well or not didn’t detract much from the overall appeal of “Excalibur”. And in the end, perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this effort is that N-SONIC is a rare K-pop group that doesn’t even have their own Wikipedia page, and “Excalibur” will likely end up deserving more play than it gets as a result.
