화양연화 pt.1 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. 1)

The record

화양연화 pt.1 is BTS’s third mini album, released on 29 April 2015 with nine tracks. The title track is ‘I NEED U’. The label ships it in English as The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. 1, and the Korean title, read aloud, is hwayangyeonhwa — a four-character phrase for the most beautiful moment of a life, the season when a flower is fully out. BIGHIT MUSIC’s album introduction on Bugs says the group, having closed the school trilogy with Skool Luv Affair, begins here to talk about youth, and takes as its theme a time in which beauty and unease sit together. The same text says this is the first record on which the four singing members put their names to production and writing credits, after three albums worked on mainly by the three rappers.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in its 1st Listen for late April 2015, as short pieces by three critics. Mimyo went through the first three songs in turn: “if the fury of the intro ‘The Most Beautiful Moment in Life’ has grown fiercer than before, then ‘I NEED U’ adds glamour with a more electronic-friendly, ‘K-pop-ish’ sound, and ‘Hold Me Tight’ catches an aching feeling, more so than ever, and does it gracefully.” He went on: “‘Dope’ and ‘Boyz with Fun’, which take up the middle of the record, pour aggressive energy out as sheer good humour and deliver an uplift that is impossible to sit still through.”

O-yo wrote that “you can plainly see how much care goes into each album, and the intent behind the planning is clear”, and of the title track: “the refrain and the interlude that follows it — might that not be the most striking moment in the K-pop scene in the first half of this year?” Jo Seong-min called the record “a mini album with the volume of a full-length”, and read the larger share given to the vocal parts, set against the earlier records, as the interesting thing about it.

In January 2016 Idology ran a separate piece on this record and 화양연화 pt.2 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 2) together. Writing there, Block said of how the two move that “the way it skips back and forth between light and dark is, paradoxically, natural because the gap is so wide”, and that “on these two mini albums it was above all the sound design and the arrangements on a few tracks, which read the currents inside genre music, that stood out”.

Among the tracks

‘I NEED U’ is the song with a music video here, and the official channel’s upload is dated 29 April 2015, the day of release. The album introduction describes it as electro hip-hop with an urban style grafted on, joining a lyrical East Asian main theme to wild hip-hop.

‘Dope’ is the track the introduction describes as electronic hip-hop with a saxophone out in front, and one of the two Mimyo named as the middle of the record. ‘Boyz with Fun’ is introduced as retro funk hip-hop, a modern reading of 1980s P-Funk. ‘Moving On’ is picked out by both Block and Mimyo, who wrote that “in ‘Moving On’, which carries a change of course and the will behind it, an unhurried air locks together with a weighty message, and that too is striking”. ‘Outro : Love is Not Over’ is the song the introduction names as Jung Kook’s first attempt at production.

Numbers

The label’s own distribution metadata prints the English title as The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. 1, dated 29 April 2015. The English song titles come from the same place: ‘화양연화’ is The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, ‘잡아줘’ is Hold Me Tight, ‘쩔어’ is Dope, ‘흥탄소년단’ is Boyz with Fun and ‘이사’ is Moving On.

What came after

The sequence that opens here runs on seven months later into 화양연화 pt.2 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 2), and closes the following May with 화양연화 Young Forever (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever), which gathers the songs of both. After that comes the second full-length album, Wings.