KIM JUNG MI - Now

When Light In The Attic compiled Beautiful Rivers And Mountains this past fall, an anthology of tracks led by/produced by/featuring Shin Joong Hyun, many of us on staff here were especially struck by "The Sun," a track featuring the vocals of psych-folk songbird Kim Jung Mi; we're glad to now have the chance to listen to this reissue of Now, Mi's 1973 full-length effort produced by Shin.

"At the dawn of the 1970s, South Korea’s rock music scene was at its zenith. Much of the reason for this was the god-like musical touch of guitar wizard, songwriter, producer, and arranger Shin Joong Hyun. For this album, he took a young girl named Kim Jung Mi, and transformed her from a wallflower student into a folk-psych chanteuse in record time (if Francoise Hardy is the Marianne Faithful of France, then Kim Jung Mi is, I suppose, the Francoise Hardy of Korea)." - Light In The Attic

"Kim Jung Mi's Now is probably one of the oddest albums I've ever heard. That's not because Now sounds especially exotic, though. On the contrary, it's because it doesn't. The point isn't that the album is derivative. It's that it's familiar. When I listen to 'Lonely Heart,' for example, I feel like I'm hearing something for the thousandth time, even though I can't exactly put my finger on where. It's too psych for Sandy Denny, not bluesy enough to be Janis Joplin, not smoky enough for the pop cabaret of Julie London, not over-carbonated enough to be Serge Gainsbourg—but it's somewhere in a world where all those things are on the jukebox." - Splice Today