Miss A – Miss a Hush – Amazon.com Music

Three years ago, JYP a leading Kpop production group created the girl group Miss A. Miss A stands for Miss Asia–a name which in view of the success of Korean pop music in east Asia may have seemed a little presumptuous. Yet Miss A stands out from the crowd of Korean girl pop stars–the girls are good dancers, good singers and beautiful and sexy rather than simply cute. Their song Bad Girl Good Girl was a massive Asian hit and one of the great pop songs of 2010–even if almost unheard in America.

Miss A has now returned with an album that fulfills the promise of that great song. Hush combines 7 new songs (8 if you wish to count the two versions of Hush, one acoustic and one synthesizer, as two separate songs) with five songs which were released in the last two years. The new songs are extremely strong–there is not a bad song in the mix. What is astonishing is that all the new songs are a marked improvement over the older songs on this CD. The older songs are not bad; the new songs are simply on a different higher level.

This may be one of the strongest pop music albums released in years with no really weak tracks and a majority of the songs sounding like instant hits. Only the language barrier and sheer American provincialism keep Miss A from being one of the biggest–if not the biggest group-in America. An immensely listenable CD Hush is destined to be a K pop classic–perhaps the first truly great K pop album.

In the past I have satisfied myself with downloading MP3s of Miss A and listened to the music largely on my MP3 player. I bought the CD this time and I am impressed with its high recording quality. The CD itself is in some very fancy packaging. The CD case is an oversized triangle with opens to be an even larger triangle with a picture of each girl in each vertex. A small booklet glued to the inside features even more cheesecake photos. A true K pop fan would, I suppose, love this over the top packaging. Yours truly, a middle aged music nerd, is just annoyed at having to find special shelf space for it. However, I think the extremely high quality of the musical production means the CD is a worthwhile purchase unless you only intend to listen to it on a computer or an MP3 player.

If by chance you have stumbled over this review without a solid idea who Miss A is, just google Miss A Hush and watch the video on You Tube–but be sure to bookmark this page because you will then definitely want to buy the CD!