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boysplanetrecaps · 10 months ago

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Build Up, Ep 5: The First 3x3 Death Match Performance

Welcome back to your favorite recap series that you’re currently looking at: My Build Up Recaps! In the previous one, we covered all the setup for the next round of performances, the 3x3 Death Match. In this one, we’ll finish off episode 5. We’ll check in with the judges and see a performance. Let’s go!

(By the way, I am not going to spoil who is in any of the performances above the read more link, post elimination, so that if you’re behind on the show, my page will always be safe to visit.)

It’s performance day -- time for some banter between the judges.

Alas, Seungkwan from Seventeen won't be here today since he was a one day judge. I’ll miss him, and I’ll miss Team Pledis.

Both the female judges are dressed to the nines. Solar looks especially gorgeous in a black dress with gathered spaghetti straps and perfectly wavy hair, kind of a Veronica Lake look.

Wendy has gotten extensions since we saw her last, and she looks beautiful in an off the shoulder ruffly white dress.

Meanwhile, the male judges showed up in whatever they found on the chair next to their beds.

What is Baekho wearing?? Does it say Fart? It can’t say Fart. What does it say and why does it say Fart? What is happening? He still looks hot, though.

The guest judge arrives, and it's Lim Seulong of 2am.

I admit, I'm not really a fan of 2am -- not to say I dislike them, just that I don't know them. Originally they were part of a group called One Day, which split into two halves, 2am and 2pm. You may know of 2pm as the original performers of “My House” of Boys Planet fame. Unlike their poppy, dancey brother group, 2am is a vocal group that mostly sings ballads.

Seulong says that he's been watching the show and knows how talented the guys are. He seems especially impressed that they can dance and rap as well as sing. VCG says, “well you can dance too,” and Seulong reminds him that 2am is a ballad group. But the MNET editors have dug up some past footage of Seolong in a real 2nd generation looking outfit, dancing uncomfortably. The judges laugh together about how bad balladeers can be at dancing, which reminds them that apparently recently VCG was seen somewhere dancing to Baggy Jeans by NCT. “I think you dance the most of anyone here,” teases Baekho, and everyone laughs.

Dahee comes out and introduces herself, and everyone claps and cheers for her. Backstage, some of the guys -- led by Woong -- do a cheer for her.

You guys, I don’t know WHAT Dahee is wearing. I mean, I’m here for it, I’m here for whatever she does. But it appears to be a thin, long sleeved white shirt under a pink spaghetti strap corset dress with large external pockets, made out of textured fabric or jacquard. Or maybe it’s not a dress? Maybe it’s a top and a skirt combo? What are those long white things hanging down? Is she wearing only one earring? What is happening? Still here for it though.

Everyone applauds the guest judge Seulong, and then Dahee reminds us all that this is the Triple Death Match, in case we haven’t been having nightmares about it for weeks. Dahee says, “The judges will watch both teams perform and then pick the team of three that is well built. All winners will survive and all losers will be disqualified.” This seems to be news to Solar, who gasps and says, “Ohmo!”

Allow me to theorize here: Though Dahee doesn’t say anything about this, I think the judges will save one person from the 15 losing contestants. Otherwise, they’ll have 15 remaining guys, and then what? Have them perform as 5 groups of three, or 3 groups of five? Doesn’t make sense. But if the judges save one person, then they’d have 16, which is is four groups of four, and I think that’s ideal. So, I’m holding on to that idea for now. I guess we’ll find out.

The judges talk about how high the stakes are, and that they’re looking for harmony among the teams. That gives them all an excuse to flatter/tease Solar about how amazing Mamamoo’s harmony is. “They even greet in harmony,” Baekho exclaims, and Solar is obviously pretty flattered. It’s cute.

Mama, mama, moooooo…

Dahee asks the judges what they’ll be looking for. Eunkwang says that, unlike the first two rounds when he evaluated everyone separately, this time he’s going to judge the team as a combined whole.

Jay, Wumuti, and Hayoon, backstage, bring their fingers together to symbolize their union.

Based on how they’re dressed, I wonder if they’re going to sing Blooming Day by Exo-CBX.

Guest judge Seulong talks about how important it is for a team to really get along and sing as one entity on stage, because whenever 2am had fights with one another, it led to poor performances. This does seem to match up with what we frequently see on Produce/Planet style shows -- the team that gets along better often wins. Jaehwan adds, “So, you guys listening in the green room, if you’re not getting along, make your amends before you come to the stage.”

Backstage, Wumuti turns to Jay and says, “We’ll just have to hide it well.”

Ok, I know I said the guys got dressed in whatever they found on the chair by their bed, but I take it back: Jaehwan has been raiding Park Jihoo’s closet and stealing the ugly clothes he wore for the Nitro comeback.

I will never stop being angry about the clothing in this video. I’ll be recapping Boys Planet season 53 and still complaining about this.

Why is he wearing a leather vest and a bolo tie? I guess a better question is, what else did you expect from Jaehwan but utter chaos?

Dahee says the death match starts… NOW! Everyone is nervous, including me! Including you!!!

The first teams up are Jeup’s team and Bain’s team. Oh no! This is the match up I’m most sad about.

Jeup’s team comes out looking great in suits and ties.

Jeup has a dapper three piece pinstriped suit on that looks great, and Seunghun has altered the shade of his hair a smidge, I think -- it looks much nicer. Choi Suhwan has decided for some reason not to wear a tie, and I wish he had, but they still look great overall. My guess of their song, based on their outfit, is Hey Mama by EXO-CBX. That would be a great choice, too, btw.

Bain’s team comes out looking… I don’t know, like motorcycle cowboys.

Bitsaeon has on a shiny leather suit with I think no shirt underneath, just a red tie. Bain’s hair is darker, which suits him better, and he has shiny pants and a short sleeved blazer with a wide lapelled white shirt and a bolo tie. Why? Why this? And Minseo is wearing shiny leather pants, a shiny leather vest, and a big cross necklace over his white shirt. Maybe they’re doing Unforgiven by Le Sserafim? Or Cowboy by f(x)? I mean obviously it’s not Cowboy by f(x). But imagine if it was. I can’t think of any other Kpop song with a slightly “country” edge besides Bad News by Kiss of Life, which they wouldn’t be doing. So my official guess is Unforgiven.

Sunyoul is like, “this feels like the semi-finals!”

Everyone has these huge reactions to the match up, which is silly since they’ve known who would be matched up since their encounter with the Moodboard of Doom.

We head into flashback most. First, we're reminded of how well everyone did in the previous mission. Referring to the stacked matchup, Wumuti says, “We made this happen. I feel bad.” And then we get a flashback to the whole Moodboard of Doom moment, which was like, five minutes ago in this same episode. Yeah, we didn't have time to watch Lee Hwanhee sing but we did have time to watch clips of stuff we already saw, and time to watch Wumuti move things around on the Moodboard *twice*.

Anyway, we get it, it was smart of Jay’s team to make sure that for sure one of those two teams would be eliminated. But I'm still sad about losing either of these teams.

Neither team is happy about the match up, but they both promise to do their best, and nod at each other respectfully.

Jeup is already nervous, because he knows how important song choice is going to be here. Strong agree!

We get a flashback-within-a-flashback montage of Jeup’s experience so far. He was praised by judges, but not chosen as top tier. He got a standing ovation, but his team came in fifth. He’s disappointed at not doing even better than he has been. “Now I need to show something else,” he interviews, as his cheekbones shine in the stage lights cheerfully. “If not I might get eliminated.”

He, his cheekbones, and his s w e a t e r all are extremely stressed out, but he’s thinking clearly enough to suggest a song that might work: Prayer (I’ll be Your Man) by BtoB. You might remember the song from when Stray Kids covered it on Kingdom (they swapped songs with BtoB).

Anyway, Jeup explains that it’s a risky decision to tackle Eunkwang’s song, but “in order to win, I wanted to pick one of the judges and do a face-to-face match.” I get it -- you can’t play it safe here because there is no safe. It’s win or go home. So a “nice” performance won’t do; you’ve got to shoot for the moon. I’m not a huge fan of the song -- it’s a “I’ll never let you go” kind of dealie that actually kind of sounds like IPV to me but like, I get it, it’s “romantic” because it’s in the form of a song. I’ll let you read the lyrics and decide for yourself.

Oh, Seunghun is wearing a s w e a t e r too! Nice. Suhwan, you’re dead to me. Dead! Imagine. A sweatshirt. ::grumbles::

They’re meeting in… a basement? A carpeted basement with wheely office chairs, but no table…? I feel like I’ve seen this room in my dreams. My boring, boring dreams. No, but seriously, we can tell in another scene that they’re at Suhwan’s agency, Lynna. The editors blur the name out but it’s still perfectly visible. The editors also sporadically blur out a logo on Jeup’s hat, and it makes me feel like I’m having a stroke.

Anyway, the guys are worried about the high-speed rap section, and with good reason -- it doesn’t sound like you can leave it out of the song, and also it sounds like it would be challenging to do, partly just because it’s so fast, and partly because a lot of it is straight up in English. (Peniel, one of their members, is American and mostly just rapped in English for his entire tenure with BtoB.)

They pretend to debate who is going to rap, even though it’s clear they already know and are just recreating this discussion for the cameras. Jeup says that his own rapping is bad -- they’d kick him off the stage. Seunghun says, as if it has just occurred to him, “Shall I try it?” He says he used to listen to the song a lot and sing along, so he already knows it, and he can practice a lot. They try it through once, and he struggles a bit, but promises to get better.

Wow, Seunghun looks great. He must be glad he got his braces off.

Seunghun vows to work really hard, because he wants to pull his weight in the team while the other two hit those high notes. We see a montage of him practicing, and he is really getting into it, to the point that he’s wearing beanies down over his eyes.

This is what a rapper looks like!

We also see him working with his CIX teammates to help improve his rapping. And it really works!

Jeup is wearing glasses and I thought you might like to see.

Jeup is leading the team in this endeavor, and his team is working hard. I wish they weren’t going up against my other favorite team. Sigh.

We cut back to the performance stage. Eunkwang says he isn’t really on board with them doing the song, because he feels like it’s a bit boring without dancing. (Here’s a live performance of BtoB doing the song, if you’re curious how it looked on stage.) The judges all seem to want them to do well.

Solar gets into the praying spirit.

The performance begins.

Full version without reactions

My thoughts:

They did a really good job. This isn’t a song I particularly like -- I’ve never been a fan of this kind of super-serious-rapping-over-a-ballad thing that you sometimes get in kpop (and western pop). It’s just not my thing. But I can still tell that they did really good job.

Seunghun has really mastered the art of the soft, gruff intro notes. I don’t really speak Korean, but I trust everyone else who says his pronunciation in the rap was good, and it sounded good in terms of tone and rhythm to my untutored ears. He strained a bit on the high notes, though, making faces that shows how hard he’s working to hit those notes, and his vocal color isn’t quite as pretty as the others. When Jeup harmonized first with him and then with Suhwan, the transition was stark -- it sounded much nicer with Suhwan. That said, he did a good job, a better job than I would have guessed. I believe that rapping is a subset of vocal skills, and that if you can rap well, you have half the skills of a good vocalist (at least), so good for Seunghun for getting this mastered.

Suhwan was sort of the all-round guy in this performance, doing main vocals, harmonies, and a fair bit of rapping. He is so good at harmonies, I really have to give him props for that. There’s a moment when Jeup had the lead and it almost sounded like there was some sort of playback of harmonies, but no, it was just Suhwan singing more softly and sounding like a full on backup track. That isn’t easy to do. There were one or two slightly pitchy notes, but they wouldn’t have been noticeable to a casual listener, I don’t think. He also is obviously straining a tiny bit on high notes -- he hits them well, without closing his throat or anything, but I still feel like he’s hurting his voice when he hits them. That’s a minor quibble. Overall, excellent job.

Jeup’s was the MVP here. As charming as I find his shoulders, I do sometimes not *love* his vocal color, but here it just works. He can match his tone to whoever is harmonizing, and true to his brand of Cheekbones N’ Chest Voice, he hits high notes without bothering with falsetto. He just is a vocal powerhouse. I don’t like this song much, but I think this was his best performance so far on the show.

If this three became a vocal trio, and sang songs I *liked*, I’d certainly enjoy listening to them.

The staging was good here, too. The suits worked, the dry ice fog worked, the background images of lightening and whatnot worked, it was all good.

In the MNET edit, they go to a commercial right before the guys perform, so the editors obviously believed that this is compelling.

When the guys start singing, the judges have faces that are tough to read.

Eunkwang is definitely affected by this performance. Is he enjoying it? Not sure yet.

Wendy is so engrossed she forgets to make a pretty face.

I mean she’s still pretty but you know what I mean.

I think Solar is engrossed?

After one of Jeup’s effortless high notes, Solar and VCG both let out a WHOA! We also get a bunch of shots of the judges and the other contestants expressing surprised approval of Seunghun’s fast rapping.

When the guys fall to their knees, everyone reacts as if they never saw anything like this before in their lives. BtoB does the same thing in the original choreo! Sigh. Anyway.

Side note: We get this shot of some on-deck guys being surprised, and I was like, wait, who the fuck are these people?

I only recognized Kim Seohyung at first, but then I realized that that’s Geonu on the left and Soomin on the right. I guess I really connected Soomin to his slightly frizzy/curly look and didn’t recognize him like this. I approve of the color change in Geonu’s hair, but I do wish he’d consider restyling it. He has a kind of round jaw line that makes him look a bit like Suho from Exo (that is a big compliment!) and I think he’d look better with a haircut a bit like this:

Is this just an excuse to put a picture of Suho in this unrelated recap? YOU be the judge!

I also think that Geonu could pull off the controlled mullet that Suho rocked in Hurdle.

Are you ever just happy that Suho exists? Because I am.

Basically Geonu needs to have his hair bigger on top to balance his rounder jaw. That’s my entirely unexpert opinion as someone whose hair is down to her mid-back at the moment because she so fears haircuts.

Ok, back to the performance. Where was I? Oh yeah, the part where they fall to their knees. Everyone is so amazed by Seunghun’s rap that we have to have multiple instant replays.

The judges say…

When the guys are done, Jaehwan is on his feet, while the others are just sort of quietly muttering, “Wow.” Baekho gets to his feet too, and VCG just sort of repeats, “Wow, that was so good. That was SOOO good.” Backstage, Inhyuk says that this is the first time a performance on this show gave him goosebumps.

Backstage, poor Bain’s team is like, well, we’re screwed.

The judges banter a bit, and tease Eunkwang that he shouldn’t even try to critique them -- he should just tell them they did a good job. Eunkwang agrees and says that he almost cried.

Dahee asks the judges for their feedback, and the trio looks anxious.

The three faces of terror. LTR: Jeup, Seunghun, Suhwan

Eunkwang goes first. The translation here is bad, so let me paraphrase as to what I think he was saying: “As I was watching, I almost cried. So thank you for doing such a great job. It’s harder to do it without choreography or anything like that, but you did great. If my group, BtoB, were to sing it like this, all stripped down and without choreography -- I don't think we could. Your youthful energy carried you through, and I found the performance refreshing.”

Solar says, “We’ve seen many performances so far, and I liked this one the best. I think it was the most perfect performance so far. I got chills toward the end. I have no words. It was really good.” And Baekho points out that Solar was so engrossed in the performance that she crumpled her note-taking paper without noticing.

Bain’s team backstage is like, well, we’re screwed. And BRP-unnie, watching on an airplane, is like, well, I’m screwed.

Jaehwan compliments Seunghun’s rapping, and everyone talks about what an all-rounder he is.

VCG talks about how they can be moved even hearing lyrics in English (that they don’t understand) because of the song’s mood. Hey, man, us Western k-pop fans know that feeling well! He also compliments Jeup’s amazing high notes that he hits without using falsetto. Jeup really is an amazing singer.

Then Dahee announces the next team, whose performance we won’t see until next episode.

They’re obviously pretty nervous after what they just saw. Bitsaeon compliments the other team but says that they came here to do their best, and that’s what they’re going to do.

Baekho says, “This song isn’t easy, either!” Wendy says, “But I think it suits these three.”

What is the song? I still think it must be Unforgiven from the outfits…

But we hear a tiny snippet of it before the episode ends and it’s just enough for me to identify the song as

BAD NEWS BY KISS OF LIFE

I’m dead, I’m officially dead. I’ll have to save some of my talk about KIOF for the next post but omg I love them soooo much.

Man, if Team Bit-bain is eliminated on Bad News, I’ll be bummed. But I’m so glad that Baekho and Wendy know the song and have an opinion about it. Kiss of Life is getting to be known!

Ok anyway we’ll talk more about it in the next post, when one of these two amazing teams is going to be eliminated, and I have a theory as to which one and I’m already bummed about it. But that’s what we all signed up for when we decided to watch this show.

See you in the next one!

#bpr recaps build up #mnet build up #build up mnet #build up #suho #cix #imfact

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