My Love My Love My Love

There's a quality of incantation to the title's repetition, and the song follows through on that premise — this is love rendered as ritual, the saying of the thing as a form of the thing itself. The production has The Black Skirts' characteristic soft-rock warmth but deployed with unusual emotional extravagance: the arrangement opens up, allows more air, makes space for the feeling to occupy. 조혜준's vocal performance here is one of his most exposed — less the studied cool of some of his work, more the unguarded register of someone for whom feeling has temporarily overridden aesthetic. The repetition generates a kind of ecstatic insistence the lyrics maintain — not a love that doubts itself, but one that keeps arriving at its own certainty through the act of naming. There's something of the great earnest pop love songs here, the tradition that treats romantic feeling as sufficient subject matter for complete artistic seriousness. In Korean indie that earnestness carries particular weight, coming against a backdrop of irony and emotional restraint. Best heard with someone you want to say this to.