I’m an avid concertgoer, mainly for GGs. I try to attend as many GG concerts as my schedule allows. The most recent ones I’ve gone to were ITZY, fromis9, and IVE, which I actually left a review for here last month. I’m writing this post to give an honest perspective on the concert I just attended, and I plan on making more review posts for the ones I go to in the future.
The venue was Ticketlink Live Arena, formerly known as the SK Olympic Handball Stadium. It’s not a huge venue, but I personally like places like this because they feel more intimate. From what I could see, the crowd looked full.
The overall vibe of the concert felt very delicate(?), I can’t quite find the word that I’m looking for as I’m writing. It was definitely different from most K-pop concerts I’ve been to. The energy was a lot more subdued, which I think mainly comes down to the nature of illit’s music and discography. Their songs aren’t exactly chant heavy or the kind where everyone is screaming along, and bang your head to.
On a side note, the VCR segment was actually pretty hype. The background music had this cool beat that had me nodding my head throughout. One thing that surprised me though was the lack of fan chants. I’m not sure if there were a lot of newer fans at the concert or glitts are just shy, but compared to most Korean concerts I’ve been to, the fan chants were noticeably absent a lot of the time.
Anyway, I digress. Let me get to the main point of this post. From an entirely performance standpoint, the concert left a lot to be desired. I’ve attended enough concerts in my lifetime to tell the difference between live singing and lip syncing, and for most of the concert it really didn’t sound like the girls were singing live, if at all. Maybe they were at times, but if they were, you genuinely couldn’t hear them over the backtrack. The backtrack was extremely loud and basically dominated the entire mix.
Even during moments where they were doing quick footwork and changing levels in the choreography, the volume and the audio coming out sounded completely identical the entire time. No volume/tone changes, no pitch differences, no mic pops, nothing that suggested the vocals were actually live. It didn’t matter whether they were wearing a headset mic, or a handheld.
They came right off the bat with a remix version of Magnetic which sounded lipsynced. Even for performances where they were sitting down, like Pimple, I still couldn’t really hear their actual voices. Not Me, Cherish, Lucky Girl Syndrome, jellyous, NOT CUTE ANYMORE, and even their cover stages all sounded like lipsynced performances to me.
The only moments where I remember hearing even a snippet of their real voices were during the encore with oops! (only during intro) and the intro of the Korean version of Almond Chocolate (even then, their voices were drowned by backtrack as soon as they started dancing). Outside of that, the loudest you’d hear from them throughout the entire concert was the occasional “소리 질러!” (Make some noise!). Even a lot of the adlibs were either skipped entirely or just covered up by the backtrack.
I might come off as pretty blunt saying this, but this concert might honestly be my least favorite one I’ve ever attended. The ticket price definitely wasn’t cheap either. Matter of fact, it was the most expensive out of all the groups I’ve seen, and other groups had way higher production value both visually and sonically.
People often say you don’t need live vocals or strong singing skills to succeed in K-pop, but the lack of those things becomes really obvious and hard to ignore in a concert setting. This concert was the prime example of that. It honestly felt like I was just watching a long medley of music show stages. And I REALLY don’t think that should be the norm.
I’d love for people in the comments to share their experience from the concert as well because I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling this way. Or maybe I’m in the minority and this is what people expect out of K-pop nowadays.
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