Awoo

Although fewer songs about water sports and anonymous gay sex grace this disc than their reputation (and history) might suggest, an outhouse nevertheless adorns the cover - a reference to the two major preoccupations of Joel Gibb, front-man of Toronto’s Hidden Cameras. Granted, Gibb’s singing is unintelligible on large swathes of ‘Awoo’, but he certainly seems less confrontational on this release, which sometimes attempts to do more than enforce a melodic but still radical vision of gay liberation (“Ban Marriage,” anybody?). Not all is new, however. “Lollipop” sounds like the Hidden Cameras of old, a wall of sound built upon rollicking piano and frantic guitars punctuated by staccato and presto references to parking lots, bus stops, sweat, lollipops, and other, mainly moist, things. And radical gay politics are given a brief, but allegro, venting in “Hump From Bending,” while “Fee Fie” inevitably slows down to praise the smell of urine. But this approach does not dominate: “She’s Gone” is a tender, guitar-strummed lament interlaced with uplifting strings, and “Haji” is a instrumental with the slightest surf influence whose sections are held together seemingly by a fire bell (à la Agitpop, from back in the day). Even love as opposed to lust is celebrated on “Heaven Turns To,” whose segue into the minor-key genius of “Wandering,” itself nothing more than a piano-fuelled slice of psychogeography, is a high-light of this disc.