Everything Is Fine

The Black Skirts — Cho Hyu-il working essentially alone — builds this out of lo-fi warmth: a slightly muffled drum machine or loose live kit, guitars recorded close and unglamorously, keyboards that sound thrifted, everything sitting in a haze that's clearly a choice rather than a budget. The title's reassurance is the joke and the wound at once, delivered in a voice that is soft, unpressured, almost mumbled, the melody carried more by phrasing than by power. That deadpan is the entire emotional method: the words insist on okayness while the arrangement and the flatness of the delivery quietly disagree, and the listener is left to decide which to believe. Cho's writing moves between Korean and English casually, and his sensibility owes as much to American bedroom indie and old soul records as to anything in the Korean mainstream, which is exactly why The Black Skirts became the crossover object of Korean indie — the band that people who don't listen to Korean indie still know. The record's ideal setting is domestic and small: a rented room, a rainy afternoon, dishes unwashed, the song playing at low volume while you fail to do the thing you meant to do and feel strangely fine about it.