The Hidden Cameras deliver Canadiana at McMichael gallery

theglobeandmail.com
By Brad Wheeler
Oct. 21, 2016

It will not be a cold day in hell when an indie-rock band plays the McMichael gallery, but a rainy night in Kleinburg. It was Thursday night, to be exact, when the Hidden Cameras, the fluidly staffed collective that traffics in something once (but no longer) self-touted as “gay church folk music,” debuted its new album at the famously woodsy art gallery nestled northwest of Toronto. And one imagines the six dead painters of the Group of Seven buried in a cemetery on the grounds were not rolling over in their graves, but were more likely each propped up on one elbow, listening to some unabashed True North Canadiania.

“Does anybody want to dance?” asks Joel Gibb, the band’s ringleader and principal figure. Many of the approximately 50 people seated in the airy, A-framed gallery No. 8 hooted and clapped in reply, but none actually got up on their feet for the pedal-steeled shanty of the old-timey Canadian classic Log Driver’s Waltz. Instead, they swayed in their plastic chairs, willingly allowing the irony of the sexual-political inciter Gibb singing a cheerful ode about what “pleases a girl completely” to wash over their heads.

Now I’ve had my chances with all sorts of men

But none is so fine as my lad on the river

So when the drive’s over, if he asks me again

I think I will marry my log driver

Gibb wears a gold suit, a replica of the brash outfit worn by a famous hip-swivelling singer on the greatest-hits collection 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. And if Gibb saluting an American King for the launch of a record called Home on Native Land in a log-cabined bastion of a bygone era of Canadian culture is wrong, then 50 or so Hidden Cameras fans don’t want to be right.

Home on Native Land (the seventh Hidden Cameras album, out Oct. 28) is an LP of country music mostly written by Gibb, with covers that include the Memphis soul classic Dark End of the Street, Tim Hardin’s Don’t Make Promises and Wade Hemsworth’s Log Driver’s Waltz.

At the McMichael, Gibb is supported by a pianist, a pedal-steel specialist, a drummer, a bassist, an electric-guitar player and a pair of children posing – their sounds cannot be heard – with mandolin and banjo.

Gibb does not introduce any of them to the audience. Let’s call them his group of seven.

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, with events and exhibitions that represent the modern as well as the bygone. This spring saw the unveiling of Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne Johnson’s Field Trip exhibition, a celebration of far-out music-festival scenes that would have Tom Thomson running over A.Y. Jackson’s easel in the forest to escape the weirdness.

Good-naturedly strumming a 12-string acoustic, Gibb and the band run through the material of Home on Native Land, a graceful country-rock adventure from the part-time Berliner (and possible Blue Rodeo fan). After the show, when asked about his twang motivations, Gibb says he’s “always had this naive idea that every band makes a country album.”

They don’t, not all of them. But if Gibb can follow up 2014’s Age - an album in F minor with a song called Gay Goth Scene - with a lyrically thoughtful update of traditional music, anything is possible. History breathes, times change - and a gold suit, like an oil-on-canvas landscape, never goes out of style.