They lied to us through cover art! Not talking Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats or even that hideous new Mew liner, but the outhouse you see above actually adorns 13-strong Toronto collective Hidden Cameras' least explicitly potty-minded artistic statement yet. Captained as always by singer/songwriter Joel Gibb, the group's latest album, AWOO, drops much of the doo-doo and the harps'n'horns extravagance of its predecessors in order to hump the crowded indie pop center like a musical David Broder.
"We're entering a new Dark Age," Gibb told an interviewer back when the U.S. was about to finish off Iraq's last few "Baathist dead-enders." Two years later, of course, the world seems even more apropos of Gibb's golden showers and orchestra-swathed enemas, even if those still come across gimmicky. Nor is it ever too late for pointed, witty political salvos like 2003's "Ban Marriage"-- O'Reilly Factorers' phony "gay agenda" phobia ad absurdum and still the Hidden Cameras' blissful apex. What we get instead is a four-letter onomatopoeia of sorts ("AWOO") and the band's typical "Lion Sleeps Tonight" high notes on some Barenaked Ladies fast-singing pop/rock trip, exacerbated by production glossy enough for a Dell commercial.
AWOO finds the Hidden Cameras prettier than ever, but with little personality and less of the haunted subtext that shadowed previous albums' sunniest tunes. "Silence from you is like the death of a tune," begins Gibb's clipped, John Darnielle-esque voice on "Death of a Tune", as staccato surf-rock guitar jousts with gently sloping violin. Meanwhile, hand-clapping "AWOO" incorporates chutes-and-ladders glockenspiel, an annoyingly repetitive title refrain, and absurdist lyrics that, based on the video, may or may not have something to do with wolves. Didgeridoo-enhanced "She's Gone" and baroque ballad "Heaven Turns To" lean closer to the band's AM-pop side, while the rattling Velvets riffs on "Learning the Lie" and the singing-alarm-clock trills of "Lollipop" rock more, relatively speaking.
There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam. Which isn't to say AWOO might not somehow be subtly subversive beneath its tame exterior, though no amount of mumbled Jung or Genesis references can save a pop album from drifting down the middle of the road. Finale "The WAning mOON"-- get it-- again evokes wolves, on a willowy bed of softest piano and the title track's familiar chords: "I never thought we would end this way," Gibb murmurs. I guess it all depends what your definition of "AWOO" is.
