The Hidden Cameras - Awoo (Rough Trade)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
When you're a kid, everything's gay. Your mate's got a gay pencil case, your mum's gay because she's a girl (girls are sooooo gay), and your friends probably think you've got a gay haircut. In this childish mindset which we all slip back in to at times, 'Awoo' sounds like the gayest album title possible. The kid in me concludes that the Hidden Cameras are well gay.
The grown up in me knows that the Hidden Cameras are actually gay and that in these admirably enlightened times this is no laughing matter. But this remains the thing that people think of first when confronted with the name 'The Hidden Cameras' - 'aren't they that gay band with the songs about wee?' Almost right. There's only one song about wee. Away from the frivolities of its title though, 'Awoo' is the Cameras' attempt to get away from all that.
They've done it. What you'll think when confronted with the name now is 'aren't they the band who wrote 'Awoo', one of the best records of 2006?', before running through every melody on it in your head and finding that the world suddenly seems a much better place to be a human in. It's great for two simple reasons, the first being the tunes, which are huge, catchy, childlike in their wide eyed love of all things sparkly and fresh. On the title track, they put such effort and feeling into a nonsensical sound that you start to believe 'Awoo', whatever it means, might be the answer to the world's ills. The infectious main refrain from that is also used in another highlight, the delicious closer that is 'Waning Moon', which might be better titled 'Wailing...', as that's what you'll be prompted to euphorically, tunefully indulge in after, oh, half a listen or so...
The other thing that's great about this record isn't so much something to do with any of the individual songs as such, it's to do with the way 'Awoo' as an album is structured. It's paced brilliantly - from the initial stomp of 'Death of a Tune' through the riot of 'She's Gone' and unremitting thwacks of 'Lollipop' onwards, it's all done at a breakneck speed. There will always be something about this band that makes me think I'm flying across open countryside on a rickety train, but what's clever is that even in its quietest moments (the tender 'Fie Fie' or closest thing there is to sinister, 'Follow These Eyes') it doesn't actually seem to get any slower. Things are happening all the time, even if they aren't going on in the forefront, and I'm completely, deliriously taken in by it all.
Gay used to mean happy, didn't it? I was right in the first place, then. 'Awoo' is the gayest record in the world.
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