It’s time for another Kpopalypse album review! This time we’re looking at Orange Caramel’s Lipstick”!
It’s well-documented that Kpopalypse.com has been a big stanner of Orange Caramel, the semi-trot trio subunit of k-pop girl group After School that was highly successful for a short period in the early 2010s before their company Pledis pulled the pin because they were afraid of catching girl germs. Orange Caramel were noted for their many hit singles, but how good were the group in full-length album form? Let’s find out!
“Lipstick” was Orange Caramel’s debut and only full-length Korean album (a separate self-titled album was released in Japan the following year). It was released in 2012, right at the height of Orange Caramel’s relevance as a pop entity, and features all their well-known hits up until the album’s release, some new material, and solo songs from each member. It also has a large photobook featuring very attractive people wearing some of the most eyesore clothing this side of Red Velvet’s “Zimzalabim” toilet-brush-wear. There were no repackages of this album, which is good from a “consumers not being scammed by Korean record labels for once” point of view, but a shame for the girls themselves as it would have at least given them the opportunity to be photographed in better clothes, something which rarely happened during this period of their careers.
“Bubble Bath” was a brand new song to start the album off, and it’s an odd choice that definitely breaks the usual k-pop album rule where the best songs tend to come first. That’s not to say it’s bad at all, in fact it’s a very decent song with some dreamy synth work, sexy bass and unusual melodic choices. However compared to the big Orange Caramel songs of the day, which are all on this album, it definitely lacks some spark. The hard Autotune is the main problem with it – it really doesn’t suit the song at all, stripping the character out of a melody which should have been popping off a lot more, but then it was 2012 and the robot voice trend was still clinging on in the k-pop world at that time. (However if it was released today it would probably have a stupid change-up halfway through, and given the choice here I guess I’ll take the old trend over the new trend.) The other major problem is that the hook just isn’t all that memorable. As good as it is, you’ll probably forget how this song even goes once you hear the songs that come after it on the album.
If you can withstand the cringe of one of the very worst English language spoken word intros to ever exist a k-pop song, plus the fact that the same spoken word intro repeats at the start of the second verse, the rest of this song is great. While I don’t envy the girls actually having to sing that chorus, it’s pretty damn catchy anyway and they only ever mimed to a pre-record in a shortened version of the song on TV stages anyway so it wouldn’t have taxed them too much to do that. “Milkshake” was a gem and it probably should have gotten the full feature treatment but by the time this album came out perhaps Pledis were nearly done with Orange Caramel anyway so I guess it wasn’t going to happen. Who understands those Pledis people.
The big feature from the album, “Lipstick” was an absolute banger and a reminder that 2000s-era pop electro-sax riffs could still work in k-pop without sounding like everyone else’s shitty pop electro-sax riffs. Featuring a video with the girls playing CGI-assisted ping-pong for seemingly no reason at all, “Lipstick” is very notable for the lyric writer and the video concept director seemingly having attended two completely different creative planning meetings. However the lack of cohesion suited Orange Caramel anyway, a group that frequently seemed to run with “lol random” as a concept, so the end result is on-brand and not all that jarring. The music reflects this randomness with the trendy electro-sax combined with a mixture of almost-ska synths and Orange Caramel’s usual modern trot sound, the result is a car crash but in a good way, one of their best ever songs.
“A~ing♡” is an older feature track, and the closest that Orange Caramel ever got to a pure trot sound, but the standard formula is revved up considerably with faster pace and heavier rhythm. The combination doesn’t quite gel, largely thanks to the constant bass drum sticking out awkwardly like one of Metallica’s “less solid” beats, against what is otherwise a pretty conservative trot arrangement, but it’s honestly just cool to hear so much kick drum in k-pop at all even if it doesn’t really fit with anything else around it. I feel like Lars Ulrich would like this one, even if he’d struggle to perform it live as well as Orange Caramel did.
Orange Caramel never topped their debut song “Magic Girl”, which copies the 1980s SAW style right down to an introductory drumroll clearly inspired by Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up“, although the song is actually a much much improved soundalike of 2000-era j-pop group C-ute’s “Hare No Platinum Doori“. The Orange Caramel version wisely strips away all the slow boring sections, the stupid clunky “flexible timing” and awful meandering blues-based junk melody from the original, replacing it with a faster, snappier, more disciplined arrangement and diatonic melodies that are a much more natural fit for the song’s chorus. It’s such an improvement that it’s hard to even imagine the original existing, but hey I’ve got to give credit to the j-pop scene – if it was able to inspire “Magic Girl” into existence at least it had a use, for once.
I’ve included a live version of this song with all three girls singing it, but it’s only Raina who sings it on the album. This ballad is as boring and generic as any other of the tens of thousands of ballads in k-pop that also exist and its inclusion severely weakens the album just by being present on it at all. Amusingly, it’s a song where the token “ballad high note” isn’t actually the highest note of the song and is almost immediately followed by something higher, not that anyone with a brain or a life cares about things like high notes in k-pop ballads but it’s notable because it actually feels like an arrangement fuck-up or maybe the writers of the music were deliberately taking the piss. Anyway this song is awful and a painful foreshadowing of Raina’s thoroughly boring post-Orange Caramel ballad soloist career, which she still weirdly seems to cling to instead of getting the group back together.
Another song that only vocally features Raina out of the group’s three girls, although at least this is upbeat. The song is mainly notable these days for also featuring rapping from S.Coups from Pledis boy group Seventeen, who didn’t debut with his own group for another three years after this came out. Anyway the song isn’t really notable in any way and doesn’t have any of the quirkiness of Orange Caramel’s better songs, if I’d never heard it before and you told me that it was instead performed by {insert any random k-pop female vocalist and random male rapper active in the early 2010s here} I’d believe you.
A fairly middling track that sounds like a 4minute or Sistar b-track from around the same period, it’s easy to see why it wasn’t chosen for a feature. However it did get a run at the group’s first fan meeting, so I’ve included the footage from that here in this post as there’s no official video and the studio quality audio is actually worse than the live version due to just being less interesting.
Orange Caramel’s “Shanghai Romance” is probably a bit thematically questionable to anyone from Shanghai in the same way that someone from Tokyo might not appreciate the humour of The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese“. Then there’s the video, featuring the girls getting so annoyed by having their advances on some boy rejected that they tie him up and run him over with a biplane. However a bit of casual racism and gendered violence never stopped anyone from appreciating a good song (just look how well your current k-pop faves are doing) and anyway the song is great and I’d let Raina chop me up with a propeller blade anytime.
A solo song performed by Lizzy, that actually feels pretty out of step with Orange Caramel and more like it would belong on IU’s “Modern Times” album. Ignore the fact that it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and it’s a pleasant enough song in isolation with a surprisingly intense arrangement and some nice dynamics. It also sounds like it would work quite well live but there’s no evidence I’m aware of that she ever sung this in front of anyone outside a studio.
Nana’s solo song is another ballad, but sadly this a pretty generic one, sort of like X Japan’s “Endless Rain” without the guitar solos, or much guitar in general, or much in the way of good melody either. They definitely overdid the computer-assisted vibrato on Nana’s voice which I’m pretty sure is fooling nobody, and the fact that Nana never performed this song live should tell you something. It’s not horrible, just boring.
Raina’s ballad solo is by far the worst of the three, truly some terrible poop that should never have existed and seems born for album filler status. Raina, having no music taste to speak of and probably no choice either, did however perform this live on the radio at least once, or whatever “live” really means in Korea where groups routinely pre-record their “live” radio vocals and mime to the playback, so I’ve included the scratchy live video because at least it’s something to look at. A lot of effort for basically no purpose, you’ve probably already forgotten what this song sounds like.
The last song on the album is apparently a new recording of Orange Caramel’s previous hit song “Bangkok City” but I’ve just included the original music video here instead as damned if I can even tell what’s different about the new version. There’s no real need to bother sourcing both versions even if you’re a fan as they’re basically identical. It’s a great song which proves that you don’t actually need a pre-chorus at all, you can go straight from the verse to the chorus if you fucking want, maybe some more k-pop songwriters should try that fucking shit sometime, it might blow everyone’s tiny minds.
The main problem with Orange Caramel’s “Lipstick” as an album isn’t the songs themselves, as you can’t really ask for much more than a compilation of all the groups better material at that time. It’s overall a mostly good album with some surprisingly decent non-feature tracks, and sure there’s a few other ballady shitshows thrown in but you can easily ignore and skip those (and you will). The real issue is the false hope that this thing gave Orange Caramel fans who expected their record label Pledis to actually continue to invest in the group. After all a “first” album implies a second album which unfortunately never came, a sad pattern which seems to be reflected with k-pop girl groups as a whole (looking at you, T-ara and CCM/MBK/PocketDol). If only they’d titled it “The First And Probably Last Album”, we wouldn’t have gotten all excited. Pledis have been very scared to dip their toes into girl groups again after this, which is annoying because they did prove all those years ago that they did have some idea about how to do it right, when they could actually be bothered.
That’s all for this post! If you want certain albums reviewed let me know and I’ll add them to the ever-growing list! Kpopalypse will return!
