La La La Love Song

"La La La Love Song" carries the joyful self-awareness of a song that knows exactly what it is and embraces its own nature completely. Yerin Baek deploys her considerable vocal technique in service of something deliberately light and warm — this isn't a track making grand emotional claims, but rather celebrating the small, genuine happiness of attraction uncomplicated by the complications that usually follow. The arrangement draws on a sophisticated pop-soul template: a rolling piano figure, warm bass, percussion that has a live, organic quality despite its precision. The "la la la" of the title appears both as vocal hook and as emblem of the inexpressibility of certain emotional states — when language fails, melody takes over. Her voice here has a playful quality that surfaces periodically in her catalog but is rarely this consistently present — the ornamentation is more spontaneous, the rhythmic liberties more frequent. Production is bright and unabashedly warm, avoiding the cooler tones she sometimes favors in her more introspective work. There's a quality of musical sophistication being deployed in service of genuine uncomplicated feeling — which is, arguably, one of the hardest things to achieve in pop music. This is music for genuinely happy moments: new infatuation, Sunday mornings, the specific freedom that comes with having nothing wrong to fix.