[Review] EXO - Wolf

Let’s take a look at one of the more anticipated comebacks of early 2013. I will be taking into account both the Korean and Chinese audio, but will mainly be referring to the Korean version.
~
Vocals: 10 / 10

Note: I don’t consider the whole chanting chorus as part of the vocals. The vocals start at around 1:15 in the video. For starters, there’s a lot of power and energy in the vocals and it’s pretty good carry work from D.O, Baekhyun, and Chen. Even in the Chinese variant, D.O and Baekhyun get a considerable bulk of the lines, which is really for the best since the rest of the group only has okay voices. High notes are everywhere and the main vocalists pull them off superbly. The bridge is also beautifully crafted, with Suho, Chanyeol (!), and Kris (!) bringing up the lower register, leading in the D.O and Chen peak. I’m glad to see Chen showoff his skills in Korean, because he’s incredible.

Appearance: 9 / 10

I was concerned, thinking some of the outfits / hairstyles would be reminiscent of “Mama”, but that didn’t happen. There are two errors: Kai and Chen. Kai should never do this again. Taeyang doesn’t even pull it off that well to be honest (and I don’t recall Changmin’s look), so Kai is only worse. Chen’s hair was a little weird. While mostly everyone’s hair was spiked, giving the sort of “wild” look, he had hair down or messily parted. Outfits were okay, and I see D.O borrowed Siwon’s hat from “Perfection”.

Dance: 5 / 10

With the likes of B.A.P, SHINee, and U-Kiss, this choreography was underwhelming. There are nice parts, like the tree, fluid movement / running and such, but the “wolf” actions look pretty goofy and the “claws” make them look more like cats then anything. At first look it seemed interesting, but now they just look silly. There was potential for this, but wasn’t executed well.

Rap: 2 / 10

To be honest, this should probably be a 1. I didn’t like any parts of this rap. Between the horrific pronunciation of “wolf”, the sloppy spikes, super nasal “saranghaeyo”, obnoxious wolf noises, this was awful on the ears. This is a different kind of bad than say a Minho or Yunho bad. I’m going to give a grace point that the soft rapping during the bridge didn’t murder the entire thing. EXO has some good talent in rapping with Chanyeol and Kris, but this was really really lackluster.

Music Video: 4 / 10

My first thoughts after looking at the teaser (aside from flinching at the rap) was that there was gonna be some form of a plot, complete with angry scenes and a girl and some skinship to top it all off. Now, because SM never labeled this music video as the dance version I am just going to assume it’s just that: a music video. So where is the plot? Something I did like about the music video though is the use of screentime. More specifically, it helped mask the subpar line distribution between members. Almost everyone gets a flash of the camera across the rapping and chanting. There are some instances where one member lipsyncs another member’s vocals and it’s pretty obvious and a weird decision.

~

Overall: 60 / 100

While “Wolf” isn’t the mashup clusterfuck akin to “I Got A Boy” and “Why So Serious”, it is still yet a rather disappointing release from the SM supergiant. Thankfully, it also follows the recent SM trend of “bad title tracks”, as the rest of the songs on the album look promising (mainly Baby Don’t Cry), but I felt that as far as a powerful comeback was concerned, EXO fell quite short with their fangs.