When listening to Kim Ji-min and her band Meaningful Stone's EP Cobalt, I feel like I am hearing her for the first time. Like I am hearing who she really is. The album is her follow-up to the 2020 LP A Call From My Dream, and represents the complete germination and blossoming of something that was planted on her earlier full length... Do you want to know what that is? Well, I'm not going to string you along until next season, so here: Kim is a rock star.
A Call From My Dream was a whimsical affair that served to allow Kim to process her often vivid dreams through a mellow melange of jazz, folk, and soul. It's a gorgeous album, and from an engineering standpoint, technically better than her most recent, rawer-sounding EP. However, it fails to grab me with the same tenacious enthusiasm. Cobalt is just more fun, and that's more or less of what I'm looking for in a pop album right now.
The hard beats and power chords that propel Kim's current EP have an antecedent in one of the singles off of A Call From My Dream, "Beep-Boop, Beep-Boop." In that song, Kim confronts her mortality to a stiff, concrete pounding, hip-hop beat, a dreamy swaying groove, and a shock of vulcanized, electric guitar solos. Some of these elements get streamlined for Cobalt, but the heat and the energy remain, as the passion for the music and its performance is thrillingly retained.
Cobalt has an incredibly strong resemblance to the simple but sturdy alternative rock that reliably charted throughout the '90s. The title track takes cues from grunge and Green Day's Insomniac to cast the support structure for a series of elegantly pivoting melodies stamped with a sense of exuberant and pointed rebellion. Kim picks up her trusty acoustic guitar for "Most," and closer "Fly," both of which are characterized by concise but nimble guitar chords that knit together an unexpectedly dreamy melody, harkening back to her LP without losing their essential rock and roll edge.
The high point of the album is the damp heat of the power-pop pulsar "Dancing in the Rain," where Kim's vocal melody glides along like it's skating on foot-long pats of butter across an enormous pancake, while attempting to outpace a tsunami of maple syrup that is cresting at her back- laughing at the absurdity of her predicament with each forward thrust. The guitar work on this track is fabulous as well- driving with a hint of melancholy playfully sifted into the heap of sugary fuzz it piles on. It feels like an unreleased Douglas Hopkins penned Gin Blossoms demo, reworked by Avril Lavigne circa Nobody's Home to become level-headed but hot-blooded, indie rock masterpiece.
You could call what Kim is doing here punk. And you could definitely call it pop. I wouldn't go so far as to call it pop-punk though. It's a little more refined than that. However you want to define it, one thing is for sure, Cobalt is as bright and as brilliant as the elemental stone that shares its name- in fact, I think that's why they share a moniker. Cobalt is as pretty as rock albums come.
