Indieful ROK’s 5th Anniversary

It’s the 10th of January 2013, and with that the 5 year anniversary of Indieful ROK has arrived. Now this blog – that for so many years was such a big part of my identity – has sadly become “that blog with the charts”, and even that isn’t true anymore as the very limited time I’ve had for blogging during autumn was all dedicated towards koreanindie.com. But, I can’t let this day go to waste so I’m taking this as an opportunity to finally get one of those more personal posts I was hoping to put on this blog down.

As far as I’m concerned, 2012 was another great year. Like 2011 I didn’t listen to at all as much music as I used to, but most of what I did hear was very good. For the first time since starting this blog I wrote album reviews: for No Respect For Beauty‘s Why Perish and Lang Lee‘s Yon Yonson – both great releases that would likely end up on my list of best album of the year, had I actually listened to enough albums to make one.

I found myself a few new favorite artists while I was at it. Lang Lee, whose “로쿠차 구다사이” became a favorite with me already years ago, proved to be one of the most interesting singer-songwriters in Korea today. Although I knew I’d become a fan the moment I found out about them, post-rock band Modsdive offered one of the year’s best live experiences during the Band Incubating finals and with that cemented the position as one of this year’s very best new bands.

But perhaps the most intriguing discovery I made in 2012 was that of Sasquatch. I first came across the name while checking out all the Ssamzie Hidden Master auditions and absolutely loved what I heard. After the debut album was released in November, I made “Mannequin” the Korean representative for the December edition of the Music Alliance Pact. Could be the best song I heard all year. It’s a Hongdae band making music that sounds like 90’s k-pop – combining two of my biggest passions!

Speaking of 90’s k-pop, that’s what the second half of 2012 centered around for me. Of course it all started with drama Reply 1997 which in spite of a couple of disappointing final episodes and some minor factual misses is still one of the best dramas I’ve ever seen. That’s what I dreamed my life would be back when I was an obsessed H.O.T fan helplessly stuck on the other side of the planet. Inspired by the sudden interest in the 90’s I even arranged a weekend to show some of my k-pop loving friends a total of 26 hours of gayo tapes with the very best of what Korea had to offer in pop music 1996-1998. Fantastic in so many more ways than I could’ve ever hoped for.

And now that we’re on the subject of k-pop, I think I may have actually listened more to k-pop than any other kind of music this year much thanks to those k-pop loving friends of mine. One of my favorite music videos of the year is the 없기 version of Dalshabet‘s “있기 없기” – especially the part starting at 1:35 and the stick at 1:57. Another would be the video for Girl’s Day‘s “Oh! My God”. And as corny as it may be, I really enjoy both song and video for NRG member Cheon Myeong Hun‘s solo debut “Jungle” – a song penned by the two Untitle members.

This is already getting too long, so I should wrap it up. Thank you for reading this, even though it’s been a long time since anything worthwhile was posted. Thank you for all of your support throughout the years. This blog would not still be here without you, and I hope that you’ve been able to find from koreanindie.com all that you used to seek from Indieful ROK. While activity here may be slow also during 2013, I’ve got some really exciting projects coming up elsewhere that I hope will be of interest also to you. Let’s make it another fantastic year!

This was fun. Maybe I should get in the habit of writing this kind of posts after all….

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