I had absolutely no idea what Gundam was before I came across this soundtrack album. Turns out it’s a gigantically popular franchise in Japan (and elsewhere) based on robots – tv series, movies, games, manga, books – and this album is the soundtrack from a pavilion at the 2025 World Expo. And let me tell you – it is Epic. With a capital E. American-born, Tokyo-based composer Evan Call only came onto my radar a couple of years ago, since when I’ve heard a fair bit of his work and liked all of it – and this is one of the best yet. Anyone who loves great big orchestral film music is in for a treat: this is Big. With a capital B. (Actually, the only thing that isn’t Big is the length of the album – I spend so much time complaining about soundtrack albums that are too long – but this one’s only 29 minutes and I just want it to go on and on. I assume this is all the music Call wrote – but still, that isn’t going to stop me complaining.)

We open with “Into Infinity”, the main theme for the pavilion – it’s a kind of heroic anthem for orchestra and choir, perhaps the theme itself gets a little lost but really it doesn’t matter because the orchestration is so grand, it feels like an event. In “Welcome to Earth Port” there’s a slightly (slightly) bucolic feel at times but there’s still no doubt we’re in a grand space opera, with some Williams/Star Wars flourishes thrown in for good measure; then in “Hello Haro” things do calm down a little, with some electronics adding a different kind of feel, much more chilled-out. That’s that in terms of calmer things because after that we are into a huge piece of action music, “Escape the Orbital Station”, the choir back again and it’s breathlessly exciting – I love how crystal-clear everything is despite the large forces at work. In “Zeong” there’s a really catchy march theme with more Williams-esque florid orchestration (in terms of applicable marches, it’s probably a bit more Resistance than Imperial) and then the score itself finishes in “The Power of Gundam” with a huge reprise of the main theme – I wasn’t aware of this power and now there’s no doubting it. The album concludes with a song, “Dream Beyond Forever”, which somehow feels just as epic as the score itself – the Mongolian vocalist, Úyanga Bold, has evidently got quite the pair of lungs on her and they are deployed to maximum effect. The whole thing is so enjoyable, and despite its brevity I need a lie down afterwards; wow.

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