Review

Song Review: WEi – Home

Boy group WEi have earned some added clout this year thanks to their youngest member Junseo making it through the final of Boys II Planet and into the debuting group Alpha Drive One. Of course, this doesn’t automatically help the rest of WEi since that means he and his popularity are working elsewhere for the time being. New comeback Home sees the group reconfigured as a quintet.

WEi are one of those mid-to-low tier groups who release music each year but haven’t been able to find the kind of breakout needed to establish them beyond their core fanbase. As a casual listener myself, I can’t point to any defining aspect of their music or sound. They’ve had good songs, they’ve had bad songs, but they haven’t yet had a song that feels unique to them. Home lies closer to “good” than “bad,” but is stymied by that same issue of generic boy group tropes.

This sentimental, mid-tempo track is (refreshingly) built around melody, though the refrains are quite plug-and-play pseudo-anthemic radio fodder. It’s the kind of song that could have been released any time this past decade without much change. We’ve got some jagged, Chainsmokers synths, a canned “woah oh oh” sing-chant and plenty of emotive crooning. The guys perform it well, but without any fresh and exciting calling card Home threatens to fade into the background.

Hooks 8
 Production 7
 Longevity 8
 Bias 7
 RATING 7.5

Grade: C

One thought on “Song Review: WEi – Home

  1. It’s a challenging place to be in that lower tier of kpop groups. My usual habit is to go to my itunes and see if I have bought anything from this group and thus remember something anything about them. Nothing for WEi. Then I usually check Nick’s handy look up to look up what I said about prior songs. Bye Bye Bye, ah yes that song. … … Actually I don’t remember that song either but I remember the original Bye Bye Bye.

    Song today also exemplifies the lower tier dilemma. The song is actually pretty good and well performed and produced.

    I can easily see it as the fan service soft song on a album of a much more popular group, something that makes the stans hearts flutter just because it exists. Even the Monkees had one on every album, usually sung by Davy Jones who was considered to be “the face”. For us here today and non-stans, it just another fan service song. Tomorrow there will be another-nother one.

    Like

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