Music review: Gaijin’s 'Sunday Kodama' is a jigsaw of aural diversity 

Sometimes the experience of listening to music, and thus evaluating it, is a personal thing. 

 

Whatever I thus have to say about Gaijin’s sophomore album “Sunday Kodama” (released under Locked Down Entertainment) is shaped in many ways by my somewhat recent exposure to the band and its music. I first got to hear Gaijin itself in 2011, a band which is comprised of two expatriates, Jesse Grinter and Shinji Tanaka and one local, Raimund Marasigan. 

 

Grinter, who wrote all the songs in this album, was once a fixture of the Folk U gig series. In a 2011 compilation created for the .MOV Festival, the Gaijin song “Just Like This” can be found on an early live version. It still remains my favorite Gaijin song, and I am glad they included this on the new album.

 

Indeed, much of the songs here were tried out in places like Saguijo. The challenge for me in critiquing “Sunday Kodama” on record is figuring out whether both people familiar with the live versions and those hearing Gaijin for the frist time on record would have the same appreciation. 

 

It is a very diverse album. The first track is the Western-inspired “Gintong Sala,” the only instrumental. A classic rock feel characterizes the next two tunes: “Just Like This” and “Monsterball,” which are indeed well-crafted distillations of the sound which fans have seen on stage. The same could be said of the album as a whole. Where Grinter’s songs venture into more modern territory (“Parachutes” and “Move It Around”, evocations of a sound I recall hearing in the 1990s), they do have the marks of that careful craft. In a way, this is a tribute to the talents of Tanaka, the band’s drummer and the album’s sound engineer.

 

Grinter’s work as a lyricist is what I could now hear more clearly on its recorded form. I found some of the aural images pretty vivid yet poetically oblique, which could prove to be something that could make sense with time and engagement.   “Monsterball” is an example. There are interesting stories of encounters and partings in such songs as “Soleil” and “Parachutes.” And then, of course, there is “Just Like This” which, on a closer listen and a perusal of the lyrics, is really just a fun romp. Which is not a bad thing.

 

In a way, this sense of fun extends to the album art (which was done by the Team Manila design studio). I can laud this album for the two images on both front and back. 

 

The very vividly-lit picture of a crane lifting a ridiculously small object (a fixed-gear bike), against which very elegant type is set, is mirrored by a picture of the band’s three members, pretending to be executives looking at an (elaborate) construction project. The image is way too serious to be taken seriously.

 

Perhaps the key for me is that, as with my experience of Gaijin live, I expect little more than enjoying what the band did with this album. But what I do expect eventually is to listen beyond that, to pay attention to the little details of craft and to what it offers by way of poetry. – KDM, GMA News 

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Ren Aguila writes on film and music for GMA News Online. The views expressed in this article are solely his own.