[Review] CLC - No

The world of Cube Entertainment has changed ever since the Fire Nation attacked Hyuna and E'Dawn revealed their relationship, and now CLC are in a position to become the primary attraction (if their junior girl group hasn't snatched that up already). Teasers for "No" were extensive and the audio snippets showed a lot of promise. The members looked and sounded great - so this could be a breakthrough moment. For some reason in 2019 I'm paying attention to teasers more. We'll see if that is a positive or negative thing in due time.

Let's start positive: those visuals are dangerous. Everyone looks really fucking good and only Yujin falls behind (even without bangs she has always been the outlier for me). Seungyeon and Yeeun's presence carry the rest of CLC, but we shouldn't discredit the likes of Sorn and Elkie either. Both have solid charisma as young vocalists. If you compare how they look and act from "Hobgoblin" to "No," that shit is night and day. That chorus is fantastic and the highlight of the song. "I love me, I like it" is a great line: both memorable and set the tone for the rest of the chorus. It's a shame that the instrumental is not properly supported by the choreography which I consider to be CLC's strength from their past hits. This time around everything was more dialed back which is not something Seungyeon or Yeeun deserve. Speaking of Yeeun she was also great. You can clearly hear the Hyuna influence in her rapping style but it's less prominent than before, and I'm excited to see her develop in a post-Hyuna world.

Ironically, the Achilles' Heel of this song is right there in the title. That long string of English really doesn't contribute to the song outside of using mentioned items in the music video. Not to mention that (a) some of the pronunciations are off, (b) the string is too long, and (c) all the bizarre audio tinkering really make it unpleasant to listen to. We will henceforth call this the "RBB" syndrome where an English sequence is mediocre at best and used way too much throughout a track. I wouldn't have minded if this was used two times: once at the beginning and once to cap the song off, but there's probably an entire minute of that "red lip? no" sequence (including the Korean take which admittedly was a nice touch). No Kpop song should have that much English in it, doubly so when it's not even being sung.

I want to like "No." I really do. CLC are darlings and my heart is out for many of them: Seungyeon the badass, Elkie the Hong Kong rep, Yeeun the rap starlet, etc. "Hobgoblin" and "Black Dress" were solid but "No" feels like a step back. The awkward English series is rampant and takes up way too much space in the song. That highlight chorus shines, but one of the reasons for it is due to the lack of substance elsewhere in the song. While "No" ended up their title track of choice, I can't help but feel that "La Vie En Rose" was the more well-rounded option despite the safer genre.