SOUNDTRACK: THE HIDDEN CAMERAS-Live at Massey Hall (August 4, 2016).
I watched the Peaches concert before this one and so my first exposure to Joe Gibb, who is The Hidden Cameras, was as a guy dressed in bondage singing gruffly to Peaches. I saw also that he music was described as “gay church folk music.”
Imagine my surprise when Joe Gibb came out on stage in a gold suit with a big old rockabilly guitar.
In the interview he explains that he has been working on this record for about ten years, but he always had other records that came first. He was thrilled to finally put out this one out because it is “light compared to the dark previous albums.”
This album Home on Native Land was recorded over 10 years with guest appearances by Rufus Wainwright, Feist, Ron Sexsmith, Neil Tennant, Bahamas and Mary Margaret O’Hara including original compositions as well as covers of “Dark End Of The Street” and “Don’t Make Promises” by Tim Hardin and Canadian classic “Log Driver’s Waltz”
It opens with “Counting Stars” which is a catchy shuffling song about not getting into heaven. There’s a wild piano solo followed by a wild guitar solo.
“Ode to an Ah” is but 2 minutes long and the lyrics are simple “Ah Ah ha Yea, oo ooh ooh yea.” It’s a fun diversion before the cover of “The Dark End of the Street.” It’s a nice version of the classic
Then he invites Leslie Feist to come and help sing “Log Driver’s Waltz,” nt a song you expert to hear Feist singing but she sounds great singing it.
He then says he’s “so excited for our next guest…Ron Sexsmith.” Ron is tuxed up and sings two songs: “Twilight of the Season
and “Don’t Make Promises.”
After playing those new songs he goes back to a much earlier album for “Music is My Boyfriend,” a bouncy organ-fuelled dance rocker.
Then it’s to 2016’s Age for “Carpe Jugular’ A synthy bouncy dance number, which is a lot more what I assumed The Hidden Cameras sounded like.
He had spent some time in Berlin before returning to Toronto. He says that now Berlin is less about learning but that he’s missing it, “I’ve been here for 7 months.”
The final song “I Believe in the Good of Life” goes all the way back to his brilliantly named album Mississauga Goddam. It’s bouncy in the way the new songs are, and has some of that rockabilly /Elvis style.
For this show, the band is Asa Berezny, Stew Crookes, Steven Foster, Tania Gill, Sam Gleason, David, Meslin, Regina Thegentlelady, and Dorian Thornton
[READ: February 8, 2018] “Adriana”
This is a strange little meta-story that works something like an autobiography of Coetzee (unless it’s all fictional and then it’s just a funny story that makes fun of the author, I guess).
It begins with an interviewer asking Senhora Nascimento, a Brazilian woman, how she came to spend so many years in South Africa.
She has a sad story, coming from Angola with her two children–her husband was killed, brutally, in a robbery attempt. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 