BTS album review - Map of Soul: 7 is polished, precise and predictable

1/35
Jochan Embley21 February 2020

Let’s be blunt: this album was never going to be bad – there was always too much at stake. Aside from the billions that K-Pop titans BTS are responsible for shoveling into the South Korean economy, it’s hard to remember any other time when a band’s output has been so feverishly anticipated. It might even eclipse Beatlemania, with a truly worldwide scope and a deeply committed fanbase whose digital reach has helped them grow into the hundreds of millions.

And as it turns out, Map of the Soul: 7 isn’t bad. In fact, it’s rather good. But while Map of the Soul: 7 was never going to bomb, it wasn’t going to take any risks, either. It’s an impeccably polished collection, written well and performed admirably. It’s good, but it’s safe.

There is a sense here that the band, or at least the huge management company behind them, were hedging their bets. A quarter of this new album isn’t even new. The first five of 20 songs here were featured on the group’s 2019 EP Map of the Soul: Persona, and while it does provide some sort of thematic link between the two releases, it begs the question: why not just make this new album 15 tracks long?

There is a fair bit here to make all those new songs worthy of standing alone. Most impressive are the performances from each of the seven members — Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jungkook. They sing predominantly in Korean, but switch seamlessly into English and back again. Their vocal deliveries are seductively malleable, with unfailingly precise rap flows on tracks such as Intro: Persona, Interlude : Shadow and UGH!. Elsewhere, their voices are by turns delicate and commanding, gentle and abrasive. As is the case with any K-Pop band, the music is only half of it, so it’s a tantalising prospect to imagine all the choreography that will go along with these new songs in the forthcoming live shows.

There’s a broad spread of genres here, too. Lively hip-hop and sleek R&B dominate, but there are some intriguing threads weaved through the songwriting. An elegant gayageum — a traditional 12-stringed Korean instrument — mingles with hyper-modern trap beats on Black Swan, and the opening bars of UGH! could easily be mistaken for an icy grime beat. These are the best moments, when BTS’s gift for fusing disparate styles is allowed to explore. That said, the reggaeton-lite of Filter does feel like an unwelcome bit of genre tourism.

The group’s penchant for uplifting messages — the one that got them an audience with the UN back in 2018 — is as strong as ever, like on the track We are Bulletproof : the Eternal, which unimaginatively assures listeners that “we are together bulletproof”. It does ring a bit hollow at times — Inner Child ticks about every faux-inspirational cliché box available, with bleary-eyed, blue-skied strings, thudding kick drums and woah-oh group vocals. It all ends up sounding like a do-goody Take That deep cut.

At 74 minutes long, the album could, and probably should, have been cut down. And it’s impossible to ignore that the best songs — the superb Boy With Luv and Make It Right — are among those first five tracks featured on the previous EP. Still, Map of the Soul: 7 is a solid effort. It's simply fine: there’s nothing here likely to cause a stumble as the BTS phenomenon marches on.

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