I'm Ashley, and I'm the host of an album a Day, a podcast committed to taking you through over 30 years of south korean pop music history. It's fact based and opinionated commentary, and we are the blueprint. Get into it by checking it out on the alive podcast network. My name is Ashley, and this is an album a day, an english language podcast promoting commentary on south korean pop music. This podcast covers mainstream indie and some underground artists within the scene and provides both factual and opinionated K pop commentary. The biggest benefit to sharing my thoughts this way is that it will hopefully expose you to more great music and exploration of your own. Believe it or not, I recorded this episode once before it was compromised by an audio issue, so it was rather redundant in my head when I was listening to the album again, and I'm like, I know I did this. We're going to talk about those audio issues.

You're probably experiencing one right now and the wonderful way that it's being resolved. We'll get into that. And the continuation of Apink's discography right after the drop into an album a day show start. Last episode was, what? July 22. Me losing every fiber of my being over 21. I did not get those concert tickets. Probably to some of y'all. That was absolutely no shock.

Honestly, watching everything fly off of the virtual shelves, so to speak, when I was on enter park was very exciting. They apparently have had another date added to their. Their global tour. And hey, you ever. This is a side note. You've ever noticed that you'll see something that says world tour for a K pop artist and the world is Korea and Japan and perhaps another asian nation. World tour is the world of Asia. Global tour is when they actually leave the country and go on a tour.

I noticed the difference when YG was promoting marketing details and it said Blackpink has near comeback. They just celebrated one of their anniversaries and it said global tour for 21 only, but world tour for them. And I'm like, ah, now does that make sense? Mmm. Yes and no. As a North American, when we say world tour, we mean the world. But, you know, it is what it is. Maybe you had been wondering. I just wanted to give you some context to that.

Okay, so that was the last episode. But before that, the last time we talked about a pink was super long ago, super duper long ago. And there's a high possibility, high probability that I shoved this apink episode somewhere in the queue to post and it just never came to fruition. There's a high probability of always having some audio issue when you're not recording from an appropriate studio. Now, I know anybody can make a podcast and all that jazz, but the quality of the sound is very important to me and it's been trash ever since I came back after my long hiatus. But that is soon to be resolved thanks to the contributions of my Patreon patrons. Because of them, I have reached a milestone that I didn't anticipate reaching. But I have enough patrons now to be able to physically go and book 1 hour of podcast time.

That's really, really cool. It's in a studio. The studio also does video, so my episodes are what, five to seven minutes long? On any given upload, I'm able to record multiple episodes at once, as well as get video for behind the scenes to share on my Patreon. This is something that we've been waiting on for a long time. Embarrassingly, I must admit, longer than than I thought it would take. But if you at any point heard a little dog bark while I was recording, I can't record at home. I've mentioned it to y'all before. Mentioned it to y'all before.

That is a problem when you speak too fast. But yeah, it's a resolve. It will begin later this month, no later than the midpoint of the month of September. Super excited about giving y'all way better content and really getting to this better because I'll be done with grad school. I will be done. And I will be taking a picture of my graduation cap and gown for y'all to see that I did, in fact, put I am the best on there. I'll upload my graduation photo shoot as soon as the pictures come back to my, I guess to my Instagram and my Facebook. So a three day podcast is the links for that.

And I'm thinking about joining threads too. I miss what Twitter used to be, but not really. And I still have a tumblr for the podcast, but that's all the stuff I want to get out of there. Let's get into this album. Uni Anni. That's french for a year. This is the first full length studio album from Apink. It came out May 9 of 2012, and it was the final release, actually, with the member Yu kyung.

She ended up leaving the group thereafter, so this was a long time coming. Before that, they had snow pink. It was well received, and they're like, all right, it's time. We actually need to put a full length studio album out there, a solid lp instead of an ep and make magic happen. And they worked with the late Shin Sedong Tiger on this album a lot. For some of the composition, there was also super Changdi, and I have an issue with that name, not the person. Please do not misinterpret. I am not confident if it's super Changdi or Changdai, and it's bothered me for a very long time.

So let's see if I can find a solution by finding the name written in hangul. You can't assume without reading the actual context, so it's spelled S u p e R. Super. And then the second part is Changdai, and that's a Sang DG, so it's a lot of emphasis on the d in Hangul. Oh, my gosh. Y'all are having an impromptu korean language lesson, so it looks like Super Chung dai. Wow, I've been saying your name so wrong, sir. I'm very.

I am so sorry. He did a lot of work with JYP Entertainment at one point in time. Not certain if that's still a thing of consistency, but I'm familiar with the name because we did 02:00 a.m. and two PM's discography very, very early in this podcast, and he's worked with a pink, definitely miss a, I want to say beast, quite a few others. So, yeah, there's over 200 songs credited to his name at this point in time. So I was saying it wrong. We got it right now. Kim Chang tae.

So his stage name or producer name is Super Chung dae Cheongdae. So there we go. Sorry, sir. It's just a hot mess to say people's names wrong. Moving back to it, the first single that dropped from this was April 19, and that's the actual name of the song. And there were three singles in total. April 19. Hush and bew be boo.

Oh, I'm saying it wrong. I know I am. The song is very cute and catchy, though. There's a total of nine tracks on here, and it's extremely poppy. It's extremely a reflection of we're at the same label as four minute, at the same time as four minute. It sounds like songs that could have gone to the other girl group, but with a softer, softer production. No, that's not a good description. Let's.

Let's try that again. It sounds like there are songs that could have gone to four minute on some of their earlier albums, and the girls were like, no, we're aiming for the girl crush, the edgy side. We can give it away to our label mates. And did and did. So at this point in time, with this being 2012, the ladies of four minute, and just walk with me on this, y'all. I'm taking you around so you can kind of get a feel, because we've already talked about four minute. So at this point in time, four minute had already dropped. Four minutes left their studio album April of the year before, and then they had their ep volume up right around the same time as this dropping.

So volume up came out April 9 of 2012. And then a Pink had May 9 of 2012. Volume up is the album that had get on the floor volume up. Femme fatale on it, black Cat. It was a. It was a tough contender. So they were getting further into their girl crush, where edgy, weird, the baddies thing. A pink was supposed to be the softer approach, so it's not throwaway tracks.

I don't want to say that it could have worked for either group. It worked best for these women. And this is also around the time where they had their. Their b side, mister Chu, that had people in a headlock. It was an absolute chokehold with that song. Mister Chu had such an impression on the artists around at that time because they would do little parodies of it. Young women at that time, it was just a big, big thing for them. Mister Chu was actually their japanese single, and it coincided with this album.

So there you go. My nose is stopped up. I'm sorry to be sniffling on the microphone, but you all have waited so long for a good. A good review and something from me that I think is awful to not necessarily come back and let me fix that. Let me go back. Let me go back. I said Mister Chu was the japanese album. It.

It is. There was a japanese version of Hush, and it was later included as a b side on the a Pink single. Mister Chu. Mister Chu was supposed to be japanese, but it's most certainly available in hangul, so I don't necessarily know how to better explain that. I just. I just know the doggone song. Chu ipsa Luigi dog. I know that.

Okay, once again, there's a total of nine tracks on here. This bad boy charted at number four in terms of peak position on the guy on album chart. And it had some really good sales, the physical sales between 2012 and 2014. So you got a good chunk of years. That's two solid years. They sold over 40,000 units. That's no slump. You're looking at an almost 30 minutes album, and it rides fairly well.

Something that I find myself having an issue with, with Apink albums is the way in which that they sequence things. I feel like they, they give you a nice little gentle introduction, something that seems mildly unexpected from them, and then you're slapped into some ballads and in a random, hey, by the way, we can still party, we're fun, and then something to slowly bring you down emotionally at the end. But they are a borderline ballot group. We're still a ways away before people take them as seriously as they did in the latter 20 teens when they came back with mmm. So we're getting there. There was a moment where people just thought they were just for the ladies only and super hardcore fanboys who want to yell the lyrics and the fan chants with all of their might. But the women are not slumps. They're absolutely solid vocals, and it's just going to get more and more pronounced, more and more obvious as we go into their discography.

So this is not the most specific, as past episodes were, where I went song by song and gave you a little bit more. But there's a reason for that. I believe this album is the benchmarker of when things started to shift for them. Now, granted, they had a full discography and they had really good eps prior to this. They all sounded the same. And when you're about to lose a group member, that can have a huge impact on how you decide to move forward anyway. And that's what's getting ready to happen with the design of the group. You went from having a whole bunch of members to Yukyung getting ready to leave right after this album is dropped, and then you're back out here having to still continue with music.

You can't just stop. But it was a good space between the next time they released a studio album. There were other albums, there were singles, there were eps. We'll be going into secret garden next, and we will break down every single track of that ep. And then we get to the pivotal point where they have a major shift in their studio albums that takes them into the direction of who these women are. Now, when you get pigeonholed into a space of cutesy wootsy, it almost limits you from being the grown women that you are. And if you look at them now, they're just. They were stunning and beautiful then, but they are absolutely grown, and you don't want to minimize the growth of any entertainer to fit a mold that you are unwilling to let go of.

Their audience had to grow up with them or find another group to love because they have grown up as well. All right. Yep. There's a high probability that I'm not going to win this battle. So, K pop fans, on a scale of one to five, with the symphony of dogs in the background, with five being essential listening and one not worth mentioning, the a three day rating on this is a five. It is a very good album. Not for me in terms of something I would keep in heavy rotation. But we are not going to deny when an album is a good album.

I'm going to get off of here, stop my dogs from barking at a dog that's outside taking their morning walk, and I'll catch you in the next episode. Bye, y'all.