I don’t really mess with animated groups, regardless of how they were created or the story behind them. However, PLAVE have grown too big to ignore, easily competing with K-pop’s upper classmen. It helps that they have some fantastic talent working behind the scenes, even if this has rarely resulted in music I’ve gone back to more than once. new title track Born Savage takes their sound in a more explosive direction, feeling as if it could work as a nice video game soundtrack.

I remain baffled by the fact that these virtual groups don’t take advantage of their unique configuration and release material that “normal” idol groups couldn’t. It’s so weird when these acts do music show stages that consist of the same overused choreo tropes we see all the time. If you’re going to go virtual, you might as well be flying around the stage, defying laws of physics! That’s the case in Born Savage‘s music video, which also looks like a video game (crossed with an epic movie battle).

The song itself is a fine slice of rollicking rock music. There are too many vocal effects for my liking, especially given the genre. Though the vocalists seem to be quite talented, no one has the undeniably unique tone needed to make a track like this flourish. Instead, Born Savage comes across as a little anonymous. It’s hard to tell how many people are singing since the voices tend to blend into one digitized texture.

Grade: C+