Sweet Sorrow

It's been a while since I've done a post on K-pop, so here's an introduction to Sweet Sorrow, a vocal group who recently released their third CD. They can do gorgeous a capella, though as this live recording shows, it ain't easy to do it live. Still, this song, "Sunshine," from their first CD, is one of my favorite songs of the past decade, and always brings tears to my jaded old eyes.

They do covers of well-known pop songs for their fan club, such as "Dancing Queen," Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" (in Korean!), this medley of three songs by fellow K-poppers Jaurim, and this version of the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" with Lee Seunghwan's heart-stopping "A Thousand Days."



I'm not so wild about them when they're doing jazz, but that's just a matter of taste; they do Manhattan Transfer-style vocals pretty well.



Their first album remains their best, though there are some very nice songs on the latest, especially the opening track "Noraeya", which unfortunately isn't on Youtube. Somewhere, maybe a fan site or just in comments on a video, some young fan allowed that Sweet Sorrow are cute but a little bit old. At least one of them is past 30, it's true, which seems old to a teenager. But they look like youngsters to me, and I hope they stick around for a while.