This is going up way later than I initially intended because my days have been bombed the last two days. Wanna One is back with their final comeback before the project group disbands. It has been a fun ride, but I think it is time the members take a break. When I saw them perform at KCON NY this past year, you could very easily see how tired they all are. They were traveling like crazy, producing album, after album. They looked whipped. Although Wanna One Power of Destiny is the final release from the boys, I highly anticipate that we will see more coming from the boys in their individual careers soon.
I bought my copy of this album from K-Pop Store in USA on E-Bay. You can get it there for about $25. You can also get a copy of this album off of Amazon for about the same price on Amazon here. This item also has free shipping for Prime Members.
If you don’t have Amazon Prime, you can get a 30-day free trial using this link here. I will not lie, the free 2-day shipping, plus all of the free music and videos are totally worth it. I also now use it for books for my Kindle Paperwhite too, and it is honestly a life saver. They have a program called Kindle Unlimited where you can check out 10 books at a time, read them, and put them back in the Kindle library. The program cost $7.99 a month, and you get the first 30 days for free with this link.
If you do decide to get a copy of the album off of E-Bay like me, there is a program called E-bates where you can get 2% cashback on basically all album purchases.
What is E-Bates?
E-Bates is a cashback site that gives you money for purchases you may have already made. They even have an extension for multiple browsers so when you go to a website that uses Ebates, it will automatically pop up the cashback button to make sure you are saving money. I use this all the time, and I got over 80$ back from them for purchases I was going to make anyways. That’s about 3 more albums I can buy!
If you’ve never used EBates before, you can use this link to get $10 when making a qualified purchase of $25 when using EBates. You will also get whatever percent cashback is being offered from the site you are purchasing from. Sephora, typically has 4% cashback, through here. Sokoglam typically has 3%. These percentages Many other major retailers are on there as well.
For the purposes of reading the remainder of this post, I recommend that you put the album on in the background, and read through it while listening to the track that I am talking about. This is what I recommend for all of my song reviews.
Wanna One Power of Destiny Track by Track:
Destiny (Intro)
My first thoughts on the intro is that it’s really funky! Extremely electronic and high energy. I love how closer to the end of the track most of the electronic sounds drop out, and you are left with piano chords. It highlights the singing voices and makes the transition into the next track a wee bit smoother. Despite that, I think that the transition between the two tracks is still a bit rough and could have been a bit better. It’s too abrupt. Other than that, as this track is only a minute and eleven seconds long, I don’t really have much else to say.
봄바람 (Spring Breeze)
I did film a reaction to the music video for this track, so that will sum up a number of my thoughts. You can watch it here:
Other thoughts on this song? Honestly, the more I listen to it, the more that I like it! I really like how the song is mixed. It’s quite clean. On top of that, Wanna One has some really clean singers. I have no complaints about their singing at all. It’s solid. One wish would have been more harmonies, as they have good enough singers to do it, but they definitely have some good descants at the end of the song. A descant is those part where the singers are like doing runs on one note.
집 (Home)
I love how this song starts with echoing piano chords. The soft vocals that come into the track are a nice use of dynamics, which I feel a lot of artists forget about. I like how the instrumentation on the track builds up to the chorus to add momentum to the song so that it doesn’t fall flat. Musically speaking, the instrumentation to this song is actually reactively complex. If you looked at it in a mixer, there would probably be at least 15-20 tracks stacked on top of each other. I love how the hook into the chorus uses harmonies. I also like how the chorus adds in ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s chords from the members. They gave me the harmonies that I like! Yay!
Overall, I’m quite a big fan of this track! I like how they brought so many different pieces together in an upbeat, fast-tempo, electronic song. This song has complex harmonies, and complex instrumentation. I am very satisfied with this track.
불꽃놀이 (Flowerbomb)
I love how the beginning of this track has an oriental vibe to it. They use what is considered a pentatonic scale (for example, only the black keys on a piano) as well as a particular kind of xylophone that has an oriental feel to it. I also love how they take this and modernize this by using that deep, modern base sound that you hear a lot in downtempo R&B tracks. What I also enjoy is until the first chorus, they contrast the slow instrumentation by having the vocalists sing at least two or three notes per beat. They also use a lot of syncopation to add interest to the song. Syncopation is when a note is accented off the beat. If you don’t know music, if you clap, a syncopated note would fall when your hands are apart, not together, as that would be off the beat of your hands.
If you cannot tell that I like this track yet, this was just my thoughts on everything up to the chorus. I must say, I’m also in love with the chorus. It builds extremely well. They also use dynamics extremely well in this track. The chorus should be one of the loudest parts of your song. This is the part of the song you are repeating, and it also contains the main message the artist is getting across. All other parts of the song are secondary. Think about it, without a good chorus, a song is more likely to flop. You want to create that earworm. This track definitely does that.
Big fan of this song as well.
묻고싶다 (One Love)
Okay, can I say that I love how this track starts out at a much lower register? All of the tracks up to this point have really highlighted the tenors in the group, but Wanna One, as you can hear in this track has some strong baritones and basses! Those are hard to come by, so use them when you get them! That nice rich sound from those deeper voices can really take a song from B to A. It adds depth!
Musically speaking, yet again, Wanna One has brought us another complex track in regards to percussion. What I do love about this track is the consistency of the piano chords in the background that pull the whole song together. Additionally, I love the musical harmonies from the vocalists in this track. The intervals that they picked for said harmonies actually have a bit more a musical theater sound to them than pop. That might be why I like them so much, as I’m very familiar with musical theater.
Other than that, yet again, I’m really enjoying this track, musically speaking. It has a nice full rich sound. It really roots all of the musicals and lets the tenors in the group play with the tops of their range without us being over powered by said tenors.
Deeper
Okay, The piano chord progression at the beginning of this song is interesting. It also has a lot of resolves in it. A resolve is when someone is. holding a chord, and then while holding all of the other notes, you change one note to give the chord a different sound. It adds interest to a piece. I really like the piano track on this one. I also enjoy the percussion on this track up to the chorus as well.
Moving on to the chorus! I am not going to lie, yet again, I am seriously digging it! That echo (I’m blanking on the actual musical term for it) that they have going on where one of them sings “Deeper” and then one of the other singers echoes it is extremely satisfying. Additionally, the notes that the tenors are singing in the chorus, though relatively high, are very strong and stable, which is hard to do. The “Deeper, Deeper” notes are actually some of my favorite male notes, specifically that B flat on the second “Deeper”. That is like vocal crack.
Thus far, I have greatly enjoyed every single track on this album. You can tell that Wanna One is pouring a lot into this album since this is their final hurrah… unless they repackage…. please don’t do that… my Wanna One shelf is already overflowing!
This post has been really long thus far, so I am breaking it up with a Wanna One Try Not to Laugh Challenge for you all that a kind person on the internet made:
술래 (Hide and Seek)
Okay, time for the next track. I love how this track goes directly into the vocals with simple piano instrumentation thus far. I feel like this track is the most ballad-y that they have given us thus far on this album, as there have been a lot of up-tempo electronic songs up to this point. This is a nice contrast. As I always say with ballads, the danger of them is that they are easier to nitpick because they go slower, and there are a lot of sustained notes for singers.
My thoughts on the track: I love the harmonies that they add prior to the chorus in the form of ooh’s and aah’s they are quite solid. I also like how they don’t add in much percussion until the first chorus. It keeps the track moving, even if the percussion is relatively standard. One thing I do like about how they did the percussion, to put emphasis on specific lyrics, they pulled the percussion back so that the track is either void of percussion or it is muted. Yet again, a musically sound song. What I will say, this is the first track that I am not absolutely in love with. I do definitely enjoy it quite a bit though.
Awake
Okay, I love how this track started! The instrumentation has a really funky feel with that synthesized, muted piano (at least I think that is what it is). I like how they are accenting the down beat of the measure with chords to anchor the song. I also enjoy how they sing the first verse softly. It gives it that sexy sultry vibe. Once you get to the chorus this sexy-sultry vibe is emphasized with lots of vocals slides.
Once you get in the second verse, if you listen closely, there are some jazz chords that are playing in the background of Daniel rapping that enforces this sexy, sultry feel. I’m not going to lie. I feel like this song is like a crotch-grab body roll kind of song. I’m really feeling it. The vocalists are strong through the whole track. The instrumentation is complex, and they do a great job of using dynamics. I’m deeply satisfied with this trak.
소나무 (Pine Tree)
We have a song about trees here, people! It’s really interesting how the track starts with playground sounds. Within the first few notes, I think this is the first track on here that I actually don’t like. I will point out though, I never like this type of song. It’s like a stereotypical we are coming to the end of whatever we are doing, so we will write a song that sounds extremely happy with lots of major chords to end the album with it.
Musically speaking, I don’t have any complaints about this track. I personally just find songs like this, especially in comparison to the rest of the album that they gave us, very boring. It’s in a major key, it uses major chords. Songs like this are typically considered some of the easiest to perform. The piano in the instrumentation is extremely nice though!
Definitely not much of a fan of this track, but I won’t totally trash the album just because they put a more simple, easy track to perform on here.
Beautiful (Part II)
Okay, this is the second part of their single Beautiful which came out earlier in the year. Honestly, I actually like this version of the track WAY better than the original version. It is far more interesting to listen to. It is interlaced with piano arpeggios. You can very easily hear all of the harmonies because the instrumentation was stripped back.
From just listening to it, it sounds like the lyrics may be identical, but the track was remixed (correct me if I am wrong in the comments). Another things that I like about this new version in comparison to the first version is that it feels like there is a bit of asymmetry in the song, which adds a bit of interest. It doesn’t feel like it follows a typical song’s progression (ex. verse, hook, chorus, verse, hook, chorus, bridge, chorus (potentially x2). It just has this feel of being different (although it probably isn’t when you really listen to it.
K-Points: 412/5
I feel like I have been really content with all of the releases that I have heard for about the past month and a half! I was very happy with this album. I feel like it gave me something new, and something different that I didn’t get in some of their previous albums. Honestly, this is one of their best releases since last fall! Big fan of it!
Should you buy a copy of this album? I, personally, think this album is worth it. It is truly one of the best that I have heard from the group to date. It was clean, and well-produced. I definitely do not regret pre-ordering this. Should you just stream it? I definitely think it is worth streaming as well. If you don’t buy the albums like I do (#collectorsproblem), sreaming it is the next best thing.
수고했다, 워너원! 지금이는 잘 쉬어요!
Out of all of the Wanna One releases over the course of the group, which one was your favorite? Let me know in the comments below, K-Nuggets!
사랑합니다!
–Rachel
