Checkmate, One Fine Day 체크메이트, 어느 멋진 날 - Critical Kpop

This Week in Kpop saw an outpouring of releases that makes us say: We will fight for you. Yonghwa's "Checkmate" isn't the only song stuck in our heads from this week, but it may just be our favorite here at Critical Kpop. This week also saw a pre-release release (if that makes sense) from 4Minute, Infinite H's comeback, and saw us pick our MV of the month for January. What are we waiting for? Let's get started before it's too late!

Yonghwa's "Checkmate" (with JJ Lin)

What has 2015 been missing so far? An anthem! We've gotten a lot of ballads and melodramatic bawl-fests, but what about a song you can sing to on a Friday, right after a tough week at work? This song seem tailor-made to confront that corporate malaise, with a truly fist pumping collaboration between CNBLUE's Yonghwa and popular Singaporean singer-songwriter JJ Lin. This song unties countries, and languages (quite seamlessly) making the corporate lifestyle into something like a diaspora, choosing to beat against it with a resounding "Here I am, for you. I will fight with you," that is hard not to get behind, whatever the underlying message actually is (Hell, we'd follow Yonghwa and fight for him too, why not?). 

A note about Yonghwa: he is killing it with his debut album, winning music shows and landing at number one on World albums with One Fine Day. Despite boy groups coming in at a trickle, solo men are hitting it big this year and we're happy that Yonghwa is doing so well. We criminally neglected to mention his title track video last week (there are a lot of videos coming out, okay!?), but here it is. 

While the video is good and the song sufficiently dramatic, it pales in comparison to the power of "Checkmate," but, of course, our bias against most Kpop ballads might be clouding our judgment here. In the end, it doesn't matter. Yonghwa is doing very well for himself and his album is a smash hit that promises big things from Yonghwa, as a solo artist and as leader of CNBLUE.

역)

http://www.criticalkpop.com/2015/01/this-week-in-kpop-january-25-31-2015.html#sthash.Suf5O3RP.dpuf