The Hidden Cameras – “Melody” MP3/download
The Hidden Cameras – “Steal All You Can Motherfuckers”MP3/download
The Hidden Cameras put out one of my all-time favorite albums, 2004′s Mississauga Goddamn, and I tell you, I’d be better off trying to suck my own JUNK than obtaining a copy of it on vinyl. Every so often I see a copy auctioned off in the UK for nice chunks of change, but finding one in the States? You’d be better off trying to play pick-up sticks with your buttcheeks, or attempting to grip a fish with lotion-caked hands or … well, you get the gist.
I did find The Arms of His Ill, however, a “NNNNNF”-heavy 10-inch vinyl platter, consisting of skeletal Mississauga demos, that subtly hints at the grandeur to come on the proper full-length.
On these songs, the Cameras HIT in the all-consuming way early, uptempo R.E.M. never did for me, what with the jangle and such. On the full-length there’s a lot more going instrumentation-wise — lots of strings, back-up chants and what-not (sort of an Arcade Fire thing going on, but, you know, good) — but here, all you get is those delicious guitars, bass, drums and bandleader Joel Gibb‘s strangely enchanting voice, so direct and vulnerable — this is the sort of guy that uses a megaphone to apologize.
“Bboy” is my favorite cut. I’m not even sure if the guitar changes chords once, it’s that linear, that direct, and that’s the template Hidden Cameras have used time and time again to deliver their message of … well, it’s a pretty complex topic that deserves more time for close examination. This I will get to, by the way — I’ve got an old interview with Gibb I’ve been meaning to publish — but I don’t want to waste time on the politics right now because I’m in it for the music, not the drama.
Stunningly, I have problems coming up with bands I would equate to the Cameras. Straight-ahead jangle-rock with folk-y tendencies isn’t normally the brush I like to paint my record player with, I suppose, and they ARE from Canada.
But there’s something more, something primal and instinctive about the songs they strike like a match across a flinty surface. It takes a solid melodic sensibility, to be sure, yet I feel there are several other factors at work that only a friend of Gibb’s or Gibb himself would be able to elaborate, and I’m not saying this just to whet your flapping tongues for the aforementioned interview with Gibb, as I didn’t quote break the surface of his at-times confrontational veneer. A tough cookie, he was.
After taking Monday off things are gonna start flippin’ and bouncin’ this week like a ghetto booty (“hootie hoooo”), so be sure to hit me back come tomorrow.
