Review: Teen Top Carve Out A Sound Of Their Own In The New Track 'Don't I' From Their Album 'Teen Top Class' [AUDIO]

Call it the Psy effect.

Several of the songs off of the new Teen Top album "Teen Top Class," like the title track or the debut single "Rocking" lean heavy on the 1980s techno keyboard sounds that Psy has made internationally associated with K-pop.

Although they are high-energy pieces of dance pop, they all sound like well-trodden musical ground.

Yet there is one song off of the new Teen Top album that has a sound unlike anything else on the pop chart.

With a horn figure that sounds like it could be straight out of a Seals and Crofts song from the 1970s and an organic drum groove that dials in the early days of sampling, Teen Top's "Don't I" is an excitingly original offering from the six-piece boy band.

Where the other songs off of "Teen Top Class" lean heavily on digital beeps and whirs, in "Don't I" the band offers up a sound that seems to feature more live instruments, or at the least, tastier production.

Although all six members of Teen Top are actually in their teens (other than 20-year-old member C.A.P.) the retro sound works well for the group.

Their vocals offer the sweet, satifying resonance of a great throwback R&B track.

And a return to the more sonically open era of pop music that was the 1970s is fertile ground, particularly for the rapid fire rhyming approach the group employs.

There is something about their particular hip-hop style and the technique of several members rapping in synchronization that the group employs that dials in the 1980s early era of hip hop anyway.

But in those early days of rap, producers tended to stick to sampling James Brown or Parliament Funkadelic records.

It wouldn't be until a new realm of genre-pushing producers would dig past the dance records in their vinyl crate digging to use samples from pop, country or even easy listening records.

Before long rap music had changed the focus to the production gloss perfected by late 1990s chart toppers like P. Diddy, so there is still a considerable amount of music to be made using some of the sounds of the 1970s that never made it onto rap records.

And that brings us back to the horn-looping groovy 1970s sound of "Don't I."

In utilizing 1970s sounds that are atypical for hip hop, like Daft Punk before them, Teen Top dials in a sound that is both retro and new at the same time.

And they did it without a single Psy synth sound.

Check out the new song "Don't I" from the Teen Top album RIGHT HERE

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TEEN TOP
Don't I
Teen Top Class
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