Joel Gibb: Cheer Up Sunshine.

At their best, The Hidden Cameras make joyous, infectious pop which rises and falls and in places that happens here. But, and it’s a fairly significant but, it doesn’t happen often enough on this album. Joel Gibb has gone serious.

The signs are there from the very beginning. No-one is ever going to convince me that starting an album with over two minutes of drone is the way forward. What remains of the opening track ‘Ratify the New’ does little to lift the mood – it’s sludgy and plodding and only Gibb’s voice, one of the best in pop, saves it.

Elsewhere the sombre feel continues on ‘Walk On’, a bombastic march which sees Gibb doing a passable Ian Curtis impression and title track ‘Origin: Orphan’, another early-eighties sounding dirge.

Thankfully, there is enough vintage Hidden Cameras tucked away in the album to make it a worthwhile affair. ‘In The NA’, shorn of the two minute intro that was tagged on to it when released as a single, is an immediate and infectious piece of pure pop while ‘He Falls to Me’, ‘Colour of a Man’, and the trumpet driven ‘The Little Bit’ retain the wittiness and exuberance of earlier albums.

A band shouldn’t stand still, but the Hidden Cameras music has always been fairly euphoric and playful and the moments on this album which match that show that Gibb still had plenty of room for manoeuvre in that area without getting all serious on us.