"A brand new, undeniably infectious, and activist pop unit." -Grant Lawrence, CBC Radio Three, 2006.
"'Pop Goes the Pigdog!' was so extremely good that it almost defies description." -Grant Hamilton, Brandon Sun, 2007.
"['Happy Bidet'] is bare-knuckled black comedy bordering on surrealism, diabolically sharp and intricate left-wing zingers." - Rupert Bottenberg, Montreal Mirror, 2007.
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IN BRIEF
Book these guys, they're great. They are fun, clever, low-maintenance geeks who won't trash their dressing room and will show everyone a good time. They are the next medium-sized thing in Canadian indie pop, they get great reviews across the country and they make politicians (especially Winnipeg's mayor) uncomfortable. In 2007, they graced the cover of Uptown Magazine, reached 30 on Earshot's national charts, were nominated for a CBC Bucky Award and an ISSA award, hit airwaves in Havana, Cuba, and made top-ten lists in the Netherlands. Don't miss a chance to see/host this charming and catchy political pop band!
ABOUT THE BAND
The Consumer Goods are a wickedly sharp absurdist political indie pop band from Winnipeg, MB. They play crunchy pop songs with a hint of alt-country and death-folk, and they sing fun songs about oppression, imperialism and resistance.
The band is made up of five (sometimes six and seven) good friends who have all made their mark in Winnipeg's beautifully cohesive and under-attentioned music scene. Their members have collectively played on something like 50 different records (seriously) in projects like the Horribly Awfuls, Cone Five, Paper Moon, the Bonaduces, Cheatron, Enjoy Your Pumas, the Honeybuckets, the Haste, Use Every Part of the Deer, Mr. Pine, the Poets, and lonely hunters. One member of the band, Ryan McVeigh, doubles as producer, and is responsible for many of the the above-mentioned projects, as well as recent indie-smashes Boats!! and Mint Records' Hot Panda.
ARE THEY LEGIT?
They'll never admit it, except when one of them is pretending to be someone else writing a band bio. Though they cringe at the notion that they need to prove their credibility with name-checks and press-moments, they aren't big enough to spurn the industry games just yet.
So. Their first two records were reviewed in papers from Vancouver to Amsterdam. Almost all of those reviews were good, and garnered four to five star ratings. Winnipeg's Uptown Magazine has done three feature articles on the band including one cover story. They courted controversy (they wish) in 2007 when Winnipeg's mayor was asked to give a comment on one of their songs. That same song was nominated for a ISSA award for 'best Green song' on account of its slam on Mayor Katz for spraying carcinogenic Malathion on our neighbourhoods.
After multiple appearances on the CBC Radio 3 podcasts, they were nominated for a CBC Bucky Award in 2007. They lost to a song about moustaches, which is totally understandable. Their records have done very well on campus and community radio stations in North America (reached 30 in Canada) and Europe, getting plays in cities ranging from Calgary to Koln, Amsterdam to Austin, Hamilton to Havana, and even reaching 1 at a variety of stations.
They've played alongside countless travelling acts including the Paperbacks, Immaculate Machine, Salt, Novillero, Wayne Petti, Five O Clock Charlie, Greg MacPherson, Nathan, Sarah Hallman, Boats!!, the Details, the Marble Index, the Western States, the Salarymen, lonely hunters and countless others. They've been compared to fellow-Winnipeggers the Weakerthans and Propagandhi and, yes, Chris Hannah is their facebook friend.
SHOWS
The band has been booked into some of Canada's most popular venues, including the Horseshoe in Toronto, Zaphod's in Ottawa, Broken City in Calgary, the Gas Station Theatre in Winnipeg and Cafe Campus in Montreal.
They travel either as a two-piece acoustic act or a five-piece pop band, and - in spite of the tone of this bio - never cease to endear audiences with their absurd and self-deprecatory stage banter. These guys are not rock stars, they are teachers, academics, actvists, mentorship-center-lackeys and record producers (okay, that one's a little rockstarish) and audiences across the country have responded to their down-to-earth attitude and endless stream of uncomfortable body humour.
THE SONGS AND THE POLITICS
The band has released two full length records, Pop Goes the Pigdog! (2006) and Happy Bidet (2007). They are preparing to release their third record, The Anti-Imperial Cabaret, on July 26, 2008.
The songs are heavily political, but those politics are usually expressed on the surface in an absurd and funny but, ultimately, jarring way. Beneath that surface, the songs convey a surprisingly personal and poignant sense of doubt, frustration and contradiction around how to confront the social injustice that pervades contemporary liberal capitalism.
The first record featured a love song about a romantic getaway to a little known place called Babylon (currently known as Iraq) where the singer and his fictional girlfriend would be able to have a real authentic experience because - they were told - tourism has really dropped off lately. ("We'll be the only ones, they'll be no one left but us, if you don't mind the smell of burning fuel.")
The second record featured a song imagining that abortion was made illegal, just before George Bush found himself impregnated by Dick Cheney. Naturally, he did what any 'immoral' woman would do in a situation like that, he found a coat hanger in a back alley. ("Let's put some ovaries on George Bush Jr, cos I'm sure he'd love to walk a mile in yer shoes. And when he's carrying a little Cheney, he will be singin' the back-alley-caot-hanger blues.")
On the new record, a Canadian soldier returns home from a tour in Afghanistan, bragging about all the guns he's shooting and all the Arabs he's killing and all the peace he's keeping. A good, straight, white Canadian boy, he emphasizes the fact that he's fighting to liberate some brown chicks and keep the world safe from maniacal Afghan kids with stones and slingshots. ("Kill a couple o' carpet riders and win a medal or two. Carve my name into the Khyber and come on home to you!")
It's about creating absurd, problematic and sometimes disgusting images of things that really happen, but dressing them up as lighthearted pop songs. The Canadian media worships its troops, but rarely do they have to sing along with "kill a couple of carpet riders." The fact that this kind of racism is fundamental (and necessary, if you're going to create killers) in a military occupation is an aspect of our hero worship that we tend to ignore when we mourn their passing on Hockey Night in Canada.
And while the critique is trenchant and urgent, there's nothing here about holding hands and making poverty history. Bono can quite royally eat the bands' collective anus (if he can take time away from million dollar stage explosions, summit meetings with criminal world leaders and wearing his goofy sunglasses to red carpet affairs.)
This is not a band that will waste your time with heavy-handed polemics and guilty-liberal pleas for world peace. This is a band that will force you to reconsider your own assumptions about the way your world operates. This is a band that will ask you to consider the possibility that racism is profoundly ingrained into both the language and practice of war, policing and politics; that feminism is not about hating men but about resisting patriarchal structures that remain embedded in our daily life; that Canada is not and has never been a 'peacekeeping' nation, but is a state founded on genocide, protected by repression and funded by empire.
The Consumer Goods consider themselves implicated in the processes, practices and structures they oppose. They do not consider themselves better or smarter than you, in fact, they recognize that they could probably learn a thing or two from you, and they're quite happy to listen. But they hope you'll put your mind to some of the things they're doing, because - as one band member noted recently - there aren't heroes and revolutionaries and these aren't romantic battles against evildoers. There are people who are getting crushed by an oppressive system and those of us who are trying to stop the bleeding. This band does not claim to save the world, and you'll find a great deal of self-doubt, angst, frustration and disallusionment amongst the potty humour and self-assured sarcasm.
They aim to be always critical but never hypocritical and they recognize that this is a very fine line. They hope you will appreciate their efforts to toe that line, and they hope that you'll be inspired to think critically about the world around you without letting it go to your head.
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This profile is nice, we know, but the new website is even NICER!
PS. SHUT THE FUCK UP
If you would like to add our banner to your page, that would suit us plenty fine. It should suit you fine too, because it's an incredibly sexy banner and you're an incredibly sexy comrade. Our heartfelt thanks and sloppy kisses go out to Comrade David S. for creating this magnificent specimen of techonogy and revolution. If you'd like to add it to your page, just copy and paste the stuff you see below into your own profile.
