Music Assessment: Seventeen – Unhealthy Affect

Ok-pop has been mired in early-2000s nostalgia for the previous few years. For my part, the business has usually adopted essentially the most boring musical traits of that period, however sometimes we’ll see a gaggle hijack the enduring manufacturing fashion of Y2K celebrity producers Timbaland and The Neptunes. For Seventeen’s latest album, they skipped the intermediary and went straight to the supply. They’ve included tracks produced by each Timbaland and The Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams, the latter of which now has a music video.

Unhealthy Affect is certainly one of three full-group tracks on the album and the tune I used to be most curious to listen to. Pharrell has an unbelievable contact in the case of rhythm, crafting a few of the 2000s’ most iconic blasts of sparse, brittle funk. On the again of this resume, I used to be shocked the primary time I heard Unhealthy Affect. What’s with this torpid lure beat? If Pharrell’s identify wasn’t hooked up to the observe, I might by no means have pegged it as his work. The instrumental sounds generic sufficient to be nearly anybody, missing the magic contact that characterizes so lots of The Neptunes’ early-2000s hip-hop classics. The manufacturing right here feels oddly robotic and by no means brisk sufficient to elicit pleasure. It’s as if the tune is attempting to drag itself from the mud at each flip.

It is a disgrace, as a result of Unhealthy Affect additionally contains a few of the album’s most memorable melodies. The verses quantity to little or no and inhibit the tune as a lot because the instrumental does, however I like the moments of layered vocals that supply spikes of depth in an in any other case reserved association. From what I can inform given the tune’s odd construction, there are two important hooks/choruses. Each work nicely, from the sprawling melodic centerpiece to the slinky chorus that opens and closes the observe. A remix may simply rework Unhealthy Affect into an actual spotlight. Perhaps we merely wanted a mix of each promoted tracks. Give me the depth of Thunder and the sinewy hookiness of Unhealthy Affect in a single tune, every compensating for the opposite’s weak point.

Grade: C+