For nearly a quarter century, Joel Gibb has snuck a queer gaze into spaces that don’t traditionally welcome it, be it the church or the rodeo. That subversive sensibility is really the only constant in the erratic history of his band, the Hidden Cameras. To those who caught them during their early-2000s ascendancy, the Hidden Cameras seemed like a group effort: Gibb flanked himself with a chaotic cadre of classically trained musicians, amateur noisemakers, and semi-nude go-go dancers that showed fellow Canadian collectives like Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene how to really crowd a stage, and had Rough Trade guru Geoff Travis jetting into Toronto.
But the Hidden Cameras began as Gibb’s solo project, and in many respects, that’s how it’s remained. Since decamping to Berlin in 2006, Gibb has treated the band more like his own personal Etch A Sketch: devising elaborate new visions for the enterprise, wiping the slate clean with each album, and gradually displacing his former gaggle of Toronto art-scene anarchists with seasoned celebrity collaborators. While his output has become less frequent, it’s taken on more surprising forms, like the goth-dub drift of 2014’s Age or the country cosplay of 2016’s Our Home on Native Land.
Bronto arrives after the longest gap between records—nine years—and represents Gibb’s most extreme makeover yet. Once a missionary for “gay folk church music,” he is now, for the first time, writing from the discotheque. If the Hidden Cameras long fell into the indie-pop tradition of the Smiths, Belle and Sebastian, and the Magnetic Fields, the new album situates itself along the queer club-hopping continuum of Arthur Russell, Pet Shop Boys, and Hercules and Love Affair (complete with remix co-signs from ’80s elders). More than just imagining a universe where the Hidden Cameras signed to DFA instead of Rough Trade in 2003, Bronto embraces the ideal of the dancefloor as a space to lose inhibition, yielding the most candid songwriting of Gibb’s career.
That might sound like a strange thing to say about a guy who introduced himself to the world with a song about putting the “you” in urination. But while Gibb has written many tunes both sacred and profane, he’s rarely exposed a bruised heart. Bronto begins mid-crisis: On the opening “How do you love?” Gibb issues a series of down-on-my-knees pleas to an inconsiderate ex (“How can you say that you’re over me?”) over a gut-punching 4/4 thump, while a simmering string arrangement from Cameras OG Owen Pallett permeates the scene like dry ice, heightening the desperation. Even when Gibb dials down the drama (and the bpm), the ache lingers in the crestfallen synth-pop of “Undertow” like his own “Dancing on My Own.”
Under the guidance of Munich-based producer Nicolas Sierig (of the duo Joasihno), Gibb surrenders to dance music’s mind-altering, out-of-body qualities, using it less as a vessel for literary narrative than unfiltered emotional release. On the album’s deepest immersions into subterranean house hedonism (“Quantify,” “State of”), Gibb’s normally loquacious lyrics break down into minimalist mantras of desire. Quasi-title track “Brontosaurus Law,” a strobe-lit stomper that opens with an orgasmic growl, exposes the album’s primal core. When Gibb sings, “I can tell you need it/Like you know I want it,” it’s basically his polite way of saying he wants to fuck you like an animal.
BRONTO documents Gibb’s nocturnal adventures in the Berlin club scene, and it arrives in the wake of a 20th-anniversary reissue for the Hidden Cameras’ first two albums and a documentary on their Toronto origins. Between its body-rocking workouts and Vangelis-like interludes, the new record reintroduces the empathetic storyteller who served as the pied piper for the city’s post-Y2K freak scene. “You Can Call” is Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” reborn as an Erasure dance-tent anthem, and on the closing “Don’t tell me that you love me,” Gibb takes a vocal track he recorded in 2007 and hardwires it into BRONTO’s mainframe, creating a seamless synthesis of the Cameras’ early cathedral-sized hymns and his current electro affinities. In its final minute, the splendorous chorus is overtaken by a steely techno pulse, bringing this otherwise heartwarming song to an ambiguously icy conclusion. The Hidden Cameras remain a vehicle for communal ecstasy, but Gibb is always moving to his own beat.
