Himig Natin by Juan Dela Cruz with original artwork printed with laser printer
After scouring the web for weeks for Juan Dela Cruz’s Himig Natin album without success, I finally found a secondhand CD being sold for ¥1,200 by a music store through Amazon Japan, of all places.
The CD arrived the next day, covered in a protective plastic. It looked almost new.
Someday I’m going to do a proper review of this album but for now my short impressions will probably suffice.
Digitally remastered Himig Natin with cover artwork that leaves much to be desired.
It’s commendable that Vicor Records has finally remastered and released this great album on CD 30 years after the original LP. On the other hand, the presentation could have been done with a little bit more enthusiasm.
Everything about this CD–except for the music of course–is (to put it kindly) disappointing.
The overall design looks stale, there is no CD booklet, while the compact disc itself looks like it was printed with a cheap desktop inkjet printer.
But the main problem is the CD cover.
What’s wrong with using the artwork (front and back) from the original LP? It’s bad enough that CDs are smaller than vinyl so you get smaller artwork. But the people behind this release were probably thinking, “well that’s too bad, now let’s make it even smaller by putting some unnecessary oversized text and the company logo on the cover”.
The physical aspects of the CD aside, the music in this album is great, as you would expect from the progenitors of Pinoy Rock.
My thoughts about this album is pretty much summed up by this enthusiastic Japanese fan I read a while back:
It’s finally been reissued!!
The masterpiece second album Himig Natin by Juan Dela Cruz, a heavy rock band that Joey Smith (drums, vocals) of Speed, Glue & Shinki (Shinki Chen + Luis Luis Kabe + Joey Smith) joined in his native Philippines after the band broke up, has finally been officially released on CD for the first time!!
The original analog version is still a legendary out-of-print item that is worth hundreds of thousands of yen, and all the bootlegs that have been released in the past have been analog-downgraded and have terrible sound quality that even skips needles (lol), so it’s safe to say that this is a long-awaited reissue! It’s a work that I’ve been waiting for a long time.
It was 2,520 yen including tax.
The music is clear at first listen, and this is a work of high quality that will make you slap your knees and say, “Yes, this is it!” It has a Speed, Glue & Shinki vibe, in which the essence of hard and heavy psychedelic rock that was popular in the 70s is condensed and packed.
Because it is an imported CD pressed in the Philippines, the jacket is a flimsy paper that makes you want to say “What the heck is this?”, so it is not something to be praised visually. But as for the sound quality, it is a reissue from the original master, so the sound is perfect. As expected, the official version is on a different level (lol)!!
So yes, the album cover is still bad, but that’s not something that can’t be remedied by the office-variety black-and-white laser printer.
So I downloaded the original artwork, pasted it in a CD cover template, printed it on an ordinary paper, and inserted the resulting album cover into the CD.
Problem solved.
It says something about the mediocre quality of this CD that a low-resolution JPEG file printed by an ordinary laser printer on an office paper would look so much better than the original.
Since I buy CDs because of their physical appearance (see Spitz’s Fake Fur album for example), in this case if a high-quality download were available I would have just downloaded the files off the web and burned it into a CD myself.