Thanks To The Moon

And then, Sandwich parted ways with BMG, otherwise known as the Beatles’ record label, went indie, and released an album with five, (take note, not just four but five!) naked girls under a huge umbrella on the cover. Due to strict censorship at the time, under then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, they had to hire the best photoshop artist (before they were called that) not to airbrush armpits, stripes and whatnot, but to clad each babe in digital two-piece. Have you ever wondered why you can’t find a high-res image of the said album cover on the internet?

The album would be called Thanks To The Moon’s Gravitational Pull. (The moon’s gravitational pull is, in layman’s term, the force that pulls things up, the oppossite of what gravity–Earth’s gravity–does, which is pull things down. So the moon’s gravitational pull makes ’em you-know-how, while the Earth’s pulls ’em down, just like in that Radiohead song about a surgeon, “Fake Plastic Trees” I believe it was called.) The album was released to little funfare. It was then that EMI signed the band and re-released Thanks To The Moon, with bonus tracks, but unfortunately with different packaging.

So, no nude babes in digital clothing this time—not this time—not even on the inside of the CD. And for this, the new edition, even with bonus materials included, always gets a rating half a star lower than the original. But the new edition helped Sandwich reach new highs even without smoking pot. “2 Trick Phony” proved that they have more tricks up their sleeve—not just one, but two. Its music video got major airplay on both MTV and Myx. Little did we heard of the original edition. Thus, only true die-hard Bruce Willis fans knew about the original version. Most people I know don’t know about it. Including my mother.

The limited ‘indie’ early pressing of the album, has since become a hardcore collectors’ item, selling on eBay and Sulit for  a whopping JPY 4000 and is only available on import from Japan. Someone must have figured the limited edition thingie back then, bought all the remaining copies and decided to migrate to Japan—just for the extra bucks, or to be more precise, “extra lapad“.

But the album, thanks to the moon, is quite good. Even better than the last one. Liked it better than the last one, has less of Marc Abaya, and less tendency of getting “Sabotaged”. It also has “Masilungan” and non single “Not This Time.”