This is The Ailene.

Maybe the most surprising thing about Hidden Nikki is that they’re part of Terno Recordings. I say this with sincere bewilderment because they seem so not the usual stuff of Terno Recordings.

I mean, I’m a big Terno fan. One of my personal rules when people ask me for local indie recommendations is to dig through their list of bands. One can never go wrong. (Well, maybe except with Not A Boy Band, but different strokes for different folks, and maybe NABB will stroke a folk up the right way. Not me, though. No matter how many times I watch them.)

But here’s Hidden Nikki, and the overwhelming question that starts with “Why…?”

Anyway, this is about their album, whose title I can’t remember. Was it self-titled? Ah, who cares. There can’t be that many bands with the name “Hidden Nikki.”

Several thoughts.

I found the contents of the album itself to be forgettable and entirely too reminiscent of Sound. That was the first thing I noticed about Hidden Nikki’s music: “It sounds so much like Sound.” If you sneak in a track from Sound into that album, us non-Hidden-Nikki fans will never be able to tell the difference. On the other hand, there are thousands of people out there who have no idea who Sound is, and they might be completely happy with this album. “Wow, pare, ang smooth, grabe…” and other similar expressions will suffice.

Listening to the album in its entirety was almost agonizing. I kept waiting for it to peak, for that Song to come on. You know, the one that will make me go, “‘yun yon!” and it never happened. Was there any song that stood out for me from that album? The answer would be a resounding “no.”

The Hidden Nikki band members themselves seem technically and musically proficient, but so is my uncle, and you don’t hear him coming up with an album, right? I’m sure that there are tons of lovely, awesome, serendipitous stories that go with the making of the songs and the album itself, but honestly, when will regular people like us ever hear about those? And if all we have to go by is the encouragement from a tepid album, why bother digging for those stories?

Meanwhile, I had to purge all leftover feelings from Hidden Nikki with a couple of tracks from Badburn. Too much smooth jazz always makes me feel like I got stuck in an elevator that played nothing but muzak. After a while, I can feel my eyes rolling back up into their sockets, and I want to start smashing mirrors and windows and roaring. Smooth jazz does not go well with me.

(Hidden Nikki might never describe themselves as smooth jazz, and I’m sorry, I might have just made a hasty generalization by sweeping their music under the rather general genre of “smooth jazz,” but who has time to keep track with all these new genres coming up every five minutes or so?)

I’m glad that I didn’t expect anything from the Hidden Nikki album, so I was neither disappointed or surprised.

To check out Hidden Nikki’s music and judge for yourself (because really, these are all my personal opinions, and you might be a big fan of smooth jazz), here’s their Facebook fan page.