"4 Walls" wasted no time at all and drags you right into the sick beat. The tempo of this song is so good! It's chill enough to be relaxing while being flashy to support the dance / electronic nature. The vocals of f(x) are rather distinct, but they sound more unified here than compared to past songs. Even though Luna continues to be underutilized (which should really be a federal crime by now), everything fades to the background because Krystal does an incredible job. Her light and airy voice is an amazing compliment to the lovely instrumental, leaving Luna as main support providing adequate power in her lines. If you want to talk about perfect vocal runs, then Krystal in "4 Walls" might be one of the most impressive yet. Seriously, words can't describe how much I love Krystal's work here.
Unfortunately for Queen Victoria, the struggle continues. She got maybe 15% of the song and that's already a generous estimate. I'm really hoping that she'll have the dance break to herself or something because she's getting more irrelevant as time goes on, and that breaks my heart. With Sulli out of the picture, Amber walks away as the biggest winner, taking healthy portions of the song with her (previously established) good voice full of feminine charm. Of course, she also has a nice 15 second rap, which really gave me Zico vibes (imagine my reaction when I saw that Zico is actually a feature on one of the songs ha). Her English was a little unclear, or I'm deaf because I didn't recognize there was English until I looked at the lyrics. But if she can remind me of Zico's style then more power to her.
The bridge of "4 Walls" is half-good and half-bad. The segment from 2:17-2:33 is out of place, as the instrumental does a 180 and sounds like a different song entirely. This also happened in Red Velvet's "Dumb Dumb" and it's still a mystery why S.M. struggles with these transitions. In terms of establishing a buildup to the final chorus they also used the prechorus anyway. I don't see why they couldn't have cut from the instrumental break to the prechorus and then final chorus. Oh well.
If you can tell me what's going on in the MV for "4 Walls," I'd love to know. There's neat transitions between members throughout the video, along with location jumps from inside a house to the woods, to a suspicious body of water. In the woods the f(x) members find frozen copies(?) of each other. Luna cuts her foot on glass (why aren't they wearing shoes?) and Victoria submerges herself in the tub because of how few lines she received. But then we're back to the beginning of the video and they try to stop the teacup from falling / breaking. Perhaps there's some time and dimension travel involved? Like I said, kinda lost. Honestly for a song regarding walls, they sure spent plenty of time outside, heh.
"4 Walls" is mechanically sound, except for the awkward segment previously mentioned. Krystal takes a surprising MVP of the song, while Luna and Amber put out strong performances. This is one of those songs which are really good from the get-go, but will remain in the background of some other songs that have more pizzazz. Rest assured though, this is a beautiful track, and if "4 Walls" is the type of f(x) we're going to be seeing from now on, they'll be right back in the girl group race in no time. Just give Victoria some more lines, please!
[ Overall: 90 / 100 ]
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