ALIVE

The record

ALIVE is BIGBANG’s fifth mini album, released at midnight on 29 February 2012. It carries seven tracks, and all six after the intro were promoted as title tracks. Daesung’s solo ‘날개 (Wings)’ is among them.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction said that ‘BLUE’, released ahead of the record, had done well on the streaming charts, and that the video for ‘BAD BOY’ would arrive with the album. The video for ‘FANTASTIC BABY’ followed a week later, on 6 March. Four months on, the special edition Still Alive added five new songs to this record’s tracks.

Reviews

Choi Min-woo of weiv published a piece on the record on 4 March 2012. He divided the album up song by song: “There are songs where the will to change (or the appetite for ‘maturity’) shows clearly, like ‘Blue’ and ‘Bad Boy’; there is the BIGBANG music we always hear, like ‘사랑먼지’ and ‘재미 없어’; and there is a fierce club tune like ‘Fantastic Baby’, which recalls ‘바람났어’.” He went on: “At least the parts that show a will to change are striking, and this song especially so” — and turned to ‘BAD BOY’.

The Singles Jukebox, where British and American writers each file a note on one single, gave two songs from this record a page each: ‘BLUE’ on 8 March 2012 and ‘FANTASTIC BABY’ on 12 December that year.

Among the tracks

‘BAD BOY’ is the song Choi Min-woo spent longest on. He described its construction — “over a quietly laid ambience it sets the mood with short, sweet piano chords, then frames itself with a supple hip-hop beat, a shimmering tambourine and a nimble string section” — and wrote that “the unhurried groove works effectively, the melody runs smoothly and the members take their parts in earnest.” The song has a page of its own on this site.

Of the advance track ‘BLUE’, John Seroff wrote at The Singles Jukebox: “The variety of vocal approaches from the boys in ‘Blue’ provide some pleasant thematic variation on what’s otherwise a restrained offering.”

On the same outlet’s page for ‘FANTASTIC BABY’, Iain Mew wrote: “‘Fantastic Baby’ has a lot going for it. Great hulking blocks of synth noise, a succession of verses which make good use five different voices and vary between playing similarly aggressively and playing against the grain, and a great build-build-build-whoosh-intone-DANCE structure for the chorus.” Patrick St. Michel called it “a song that does a great job introducing the artist while also establishing each member’s personality”, and Brad Shoup put it this way: “It’s not a song so much as an event, or a series of set pieces.”

Numbers

This is the first Korean-language K-pop album to reach the Billboard 200. Jeff Benjamin of Billboard recorded that in a story on 20 December 2016 and reported that ALIVE sold 4,000 copies in the United States in its first week in 2012. MADE passed that figure four and a half years later.