THE HIDDEN CAMERAS - BRONTO - MOTOR

From the folk guitar to the Berlin clubs:

The Hidden Cameras - BRONTO

With BRONTO, The Hidden Cameras deliver an album that pushes the boundaries of pop. Joel Gibb, the visionary mind behind the legendary music project, dedicates an unconventional meta-dance-pop album to his adopted hometown of Berlin - and collaborates with electronic heavyweights such as Pet Shop Boys and Vince Clarke.

Nightclubs have always been central places of resistance and community in the history of gay liberation and self-empowerment. BRONTO explores the dazzling facets of this history in its own unique way, paying tribute to the pioneers – and rightfully placing itself among them.

Hardly anyone has translated the topic of gay love into music in a more original way over the last 25 years than Joel Gibb, the mastermind behind The Hidden Cameras. Founded in Toronto in 2001, the collaborative project broke the boundaries of the classic band formation with its fluid member structure. With his “gay folk church music”, Gibb sang about homoerotic love on stages - and in church halls - long before those topics had arrived in the pop mainstream.

With his seventh studio album BRONTO, Joel Gibb follows in the footsteps of pioneers such as Lou Reed and David Bowie and releases an album inspired by Berlin but recorded almost exclusively in his second adopted home of Munich. The Canadian has lived in Berlin for over 15 years - and this has by no means left his sound untouched. After folk and country, Gibb has worked with Munich-based collaborator Nicolas Sierig (Joasihno) to create BRONTO, an unconventional electronic meta-dance-pop album.

On BRONTO, which means “thunder” in Greek, Gibb puts the folk guitar aside and, in the best disco tradition, uses the studio as an instrument in which he creates highly emotional, dazzling worlds of sound. Instead of hyper-reflective linguistic acrobatics, on BRONTO Gibb deliberately plays with common phrases and questions which you might have heard a hundred times – but not like this: Thanks to his unique approach to songwriting, Gibb manages to tell stories that are still wonderfully strange and touching at the same time.

“Why do you do that, when you say you don't want me?” Gibb opens “How do you love?”, the first single from BRONTO. It is the anthem of unrequited love. Original Hidden Cameras violin player Owen Pallett provides bittersweet string arrangements. Collaboration has been in the DNA of The Hidden Cameras since its foundation in 2001. While it used to be instrumentalists and singers, Gibb now counts remixers among his musical comrades-in-arms. And what heavyweights he gathers on “How do you love?”: Pet Shop Boys give “How do you love?” an epic electro-house-pop treatment. Boys’ Shorts turn “How do you love?” into an emotional disco banger - including bombastic string pads and joyful pianos. Spanish duo Hidrogenesse transform the song into a melodic house track reminiscent of Hercules and Love Affair.

The second single, “Undertow”, deals with a past love affair in which the eponymous current unexpectedly washes the ground from under your feet - seagull samples and onomatopoeic synth pads included. There is also an extended remix 12-inch for “Undertow”. British music legend Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure), glazes the track with a glittering 80s synth-pop shimmer. Berlin dark wave duo Local Suicide whips “Undertow” in the direction of EBM.

Gibb tries various musical directions on BRONTO. On the instrumental track “Full cycle” and semi-instrumental “Wie wild”, Gibb creates small film music epics reminiscent of Ennio Morricone. On the dubby downtempo synth track “I want you”, he plays with what is probably the most frequently used phrase in pop music - Bob Dylan and Marvin Gaye send their regards. “Quantify” is Gibb’s house anthem. With “You can call”, Gibb imagines himself on the LED-flashing television stage of the Eurovision Song Contest – another facet of gay culture that the Canadian first had to get used to in Berlin. With this unofficial application song, Gibb could help the German ESC team out of its misery – who wouldn't call for this one?

On “Brontosaurus law” Gibb frees himself from heartache and finds love within himself. But Gibb wouldn't be Gibb if he didn't humorously break this slightly cheesy message with a roaring dinosaur scream at the beginning of the song: an allusion to the phallic neck of the giant lizard. “State of” finally brings the album into the club and, with its horn fills, bongo grooves and fragmented backing vocals, sounds like an instrumental version of a well-known disco banger that you unsuccessfully try to shazam on the dancefloor.

The epic “Don't tell me that you love me” is the perfect closing track that echoes in your ears on the way home. While Owen Pallett’s string arrangements have a somewhat cold and unresolved timbre on “How do you love?”, their melodic and lush movements on “Don't tell me that you love me” bookend BRONTO beautifully. It is the song on the album that sounds most like The Hidden Cameras' highly emotional folk-pop and is actually a salute from the past: Gibb wrote it back in 2007 and uses the vocals from back then. BRONTO thus becomes a decade-spanning time capsule on which Gibb enters into a dialog with his younger self and recalls the roots of The Hidden Cameras almost 25 years later.