EXO – MAMA Review

EXO MAMA Cover

Release Date: April 11, 2012

Track Listing

  1. MAMA
  2. What Is Love
  3. History
  4. Angel
  5. Two Moons feat. Key
  6. Machine

Review

EXO is a 12-member Korean/Chinese boy band formed by SM Entertainment in 2011. They are separated into sub-groups, EXO-K (Korean) and EXO-M (Mandarin), allowing them to simultaneously promote their music in Korea and China.

This group has been one of the most hyped new groups in K-Pop. SM Entertainment has done a lot to get the salivating K-Pop fan all jacked up and hyped for them through flashy teaser trailers, the singles What Is Love, History, and the self-titled song from this album.

The question is whether all that effort was worth it or whether it was all a waste of time.

That’s hard to say. What is on this EP very much follows the standard SM formula, so if you’ve heard any boy band out of that camp, you should have a good idea of what to expect here. Is that positive or negative? That would depend on how you feel about the music coming out of SM at the moment.

What is on MAMA is rather formulaic, but except for Two Moons, everything is perfectly consumable. I’m all for adding some Hip-Pop flavour, but perhaps Two Moons would have been better as an instrumental. The beat is hot, but the rapping is not.

Since this album is being promoted in Korea and China, it comes in two versions, and if you can’t figure out the significant difference between them? Well…

In the end, this was a decent album. Nothing more, nothing less. Some who bought wholesale into the hype might walk away disappointed but let’s be honest here, the majority will love this until the next boy band comes around to replace these guys when their 15 minutes is up, or mandatory military service takes them out of the idol game.

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