In Stores Now: Origin:Orphan by the Hidden Cameras

Panel from Forbidden Worlds comic book issue #29, May 1954

Toronto-based songwriter Joel Gibb has been making "gay church music" with his friends as the Hidden Cameras for almost a decade, and he hasn't lost the ability to surprise people with his music. In the early days, it was easy to shock the audience with hymns about queer politics and revival-style live shows featuring go-go dancers in ski masks. Now, with a fourth full-length release titled Origin:Orphan, the surprise is just how far the Hidden Cameras have strayed/matured from their original approach.

Origin:Orphan was recorded in various locales after the Hidden Cameras spent an extended period in Germany, and I think this shows in the album's sound. I can't pretend to know much about Krautrock - I don't really know my Neu! from my Popol Vuh - but I hear some very motorik sounds and downright Teutonic sentiments on this record. Where previous Hidden Cameras records, were propelled by bouncy folk-pop, Origin:Orphan begins with a slow-building statement of purpose called "Ratify the New". All the elements of the Hidden Cameras sound are still there - strummed acoustic guitar, strings, Gibb's crystal voice - but they are utilized differently. Most of the album's tracks are based on that propulsive, straight-forward drumbeat associated with Krautrock, and textures and repetition are emphasized in place of joyous choruses. The lyrics are also heavier and more abstract - the explicit gay content of the band's debut The Smell of Our Own is probably gone for good at this point.

I may be making this album sound gray and boring by comparing it to German things, but it's only gray and boring compared to the technicolor explosion you might expect from the Hidden Cameras. The music still has a celebratory, quasi-religious sound, and (once you get past the album's overtly Kraut-y opening track) Origin:Orphan offers a good variety of pop sounds. Single "In the NA" is very reminiscent of the band's earliest recordings (circa Ecce Homo), and two other pop songs in the Hidden Cameras' original idiom ("Underage", "The Little Bit") brighten up the album's second half. "Colour of a Man" is a nice, delicate ballad, and "Do I Belong?" brings a smile with an intro that has to be an intentional U2 imitation.

The variety and introduction of new sounds might be off-putting to longtime Hidden Cameras fans, but Gibb's work stands up better to repeat listenings with this new breadth, particularly when the band gets to stretch out and play with textures and forms on longer songs like the Origin:Orphan's title track. And if you want to get that old-school Hidden Cameras feel, you can just skip to Track 9 and enjoy the a capella intro and high-life guitar flourishes of "Underage".

"Underage" by the Hidden Cameras