Still Alive

The record

Still Alive is the special edition of the mini album ALIVE, released at midnight on 3 June 2012. Five of its nine tracks are new and the title track is ‘MONSTER’. The other four are special-edition versions of songs from the mini album four months earlier.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction called the record one prepared for the fans rather than one planned around a promotion cycle, and gave as its reason that where other special editions add a song or two, this one adds five. The same text introduced each of them: ‘FEELING’ was made by the German DJ Boys Noize with G-Dragon and T.O.P; ‘STILL ALIVE’ is the full version of ‘ALIVE’, the intro track of the preceding mini album; ‘빙글빙글 (Bingle Bingle)’ was written by Teddy with G-Dragon; and ‘EGO’ carries the feeling of a man in love. The physical album, made with Hyundai Card, went on sale on 6 June.

Reviews

The Singles Jukebox, where British and American writers each file a note on one single, gave the title track ‘MONSTER’ a page on 18 June 2012. Six writers each contributed a note.

Will Adams took the song from the arrangement. “As far as songs that sound like dance remixes of piano ballads, this is quite good,” he wrote, adding that “a bass that hums instead of belches and a front-and-center piano and strings arrangement make this sound so light, perfectly matching the sweet conceit of the whole piece.” His last sentence: “That chorus is a thing of beauty, though.”

Brad Shoup described the same song’s sound: “Piano and synthgauze and bass pulse in parallel, giving ‘Monster’ a perverse amount of danceability.” Jonathan Bogart turned to the video, noting that it splits the members up so that none of them ever shares a frame with another, which he read as “driving home the boy-band conceit of a collective that speaks in an individual voice”.

Among the tracks

‘MONSTER’ carries the record’s music video and has a page of its own on this site. The album introduction says its teaser videos went up over the five days before release, and the video list on Bugs still holds four 15-second teasers dated 7 March 2012, each named for G-Dragon, T.O.P, Daesung or Seungri.

The four songs carried over in special-edition versions are ‘BLUE’, ‘BAD BOY’, ‘FANTASTIC BABY’ and ‘사랑 먼지 (Love Dust)’. All four appeared first on ALIVE in February 2012.

Afterwards

This is the last record the whole group released in 2012, and the next one they made together is M, three years later in May 2015. The album introduction notes that BIGBANG were on a world tour in Japan at the time, drawing 255,000 people.