On the nose? More like … never mind.

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Anthony Easton: There is an artist scene in Toronto, mostly queer (Andrew Harwood, Keith Cole, Alyson Mitchell, Shary Boyle, Fastwurms, Daryl Vocat, the late Will Munro, etc.) that uses the aesthetic of late 70s occult aesthetics for a variety of ritual purposes. It has gotten big enough that Boyle’s work ended up in Venice last year. Munro was the catalyst, organizing legendary Halloween parties and making difficult work about gay sex, including the last show before he died — which featured mirrors, a leather swing, and macramé. I think that you had to be in Toronto at that time and space to fully have it break you apart, but there isn’t a week that I don’t think about it. I have been thinking about it more because it is Halloween and I am curating an event whose invitation features work by Daryl, and one of whose speakers was a friend of Will’s, and is at a gallery where that circle sometimes shows. All of this is vital background I think, because Will was part of the choir on the first couple of Hidden Cameras records, and though Joel Gibb talks about the band as a gay church choir, its questions of rite and ritual in nu queer expression is a uniquely Torontonian aesthetic problem. In the words of my friend Sholem Krishtalka, who knows more about this than I do: “It was written eleven years ago, in the epicentre of the Toronto occult aesthetic.” One wonders why it was released now.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: It feels safe to assume a song entitled “Gay Goth Scene” has its tongue kept firmly in cheek, right? This is a highly elaborate piece, juxtaposing period-perfect macabre sounds with a degree of nonsense, but it doesn’t deserve the lush treatment. Even at full force, it’s an ornate ruffle.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I can’t top what an Awl critic wrote: Bronski Beat for the Arcade Fire generation. But this tune isn’t disco enough, isn’t grandiose enough; it simmers and worries, stuck with a worried vocal.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The first section plays like a chamber orchestra’s street protest. For all the string coloration, those lashing figures, this is a blunt instrument. The bgvs are cattle lows; the drums pound in coffin nails. The Cameras got a lot of proto-BuzzFeed love for a queer take on maximal-pop collectivism. I wonder if their underlying rawness has sunk in. This must be what Arcade Fire sounds like to the converted.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: The idea of a big stoopid beat all over a Hidden Cameras song might have been unthinkable ten years ago, but then again, there is only so much you can do with perverted chamber pop. Somehow, though, despite the clear mutation, this one track comes across as more repetitive and draining than an entire album of their beatless paeans to gay sex and all its sensory accompaniments. This really needs either to be a lot more, or a lot less disco.
[3]

Mallory O’Donnell: The music here is fine: tightly-plotted cinematic details applied deftly to the familiar clean, doomy indie sheen. However, one wonders what sort of person could derive either humor or poignancy from this set of lyrics, the meaning and intent of which only grow more opaque as I continue to listen.
[5]