[Review] Secret - Love Is Move (Throwback)

Touted as one of my favorite / best Secret songs back in the day, "Love Is Move" was never reviewed - because my Kpop blogging experience started in 2012. Nonetheless I had fond memories of the upbeat dance track. So much so that when I made a (very) belated Best Of 2011 post three years ago, I had it ranked as the #11 song. Time to take a throwback look at one of Secret's premier title tracks. There's the intricacy of reviewing an old song. Am I going off how I perceived the song then and comparing it to now? Should the current state of the group and or the industry factor in? Nobody knows the answers to these questions and certainly not me.

Alright what is good about "Love Is Move?" For starters the song was fucking catchy, and it still is. The awkward mixing of Korean and English in the chorus is bearable but gets the job done. Overall the verses, prechorus, and chorus are all working together and have seamless transitions. The weakest part of this song might actually be the vocals. Not because they are necessarily bad but because of the nasality everywhere. Jieun and Hyosung are in too high a range singing...not uncomfortably per se, but certainly not to their usual notes. Both of these girls have a strong lower register and even though I know Jieun is striking with her high notes, those are suited for ballads and not cute pop tracks. Hilariously, I wrote in Best Of 2011 that Hyosung started to gain traction as a secondary vocalist, which is simply not true. She really didn't make serious strides in her vocal skills until after Secret had stopped functioning routinely as a group. Zinger and Sunhwa sound pretty bad and never got the attention or improvement Hyosung received, so they coasted on their status as the group rapper and visual, respectively. Zinger's rap is a fucking travesty to her true talents. Not really gonna comment on the choreography much. Partly because I rarely do, and partly because it looks pretty bad given the standards of dance we have all been exposed to over the last couple of years.

"Love Is Move" got the job done, but perhaps putting this song at such a lofty position as one of the best songs of 2011 was probably a reach blinded by my honeymoon phase of Kpop. The fundamentals are all there and doing well, but the vocals are ordinary at best and strained at worst. Both the rap break and general choreography left a lot to be desired, and while the song structure was well-built, it didn't necessarily go anywhere. After further review I find "Love Is Move" to be underwhelming in both 2011 and 2019. Once again, is that due to the skewed perspective of the current me? Or the blind loyalty of young me? It's impossible to determine.