Happy Bidet by The Consumer Goods

According to the Consumer Goods, insistence on intellectual rigor is what made 2007’s "Happy Bidet" arguably the best in the band’s catalogue.

Written during a tumultuous 8-month span that saw Shipley move from the comfortable Winnipeg scene to the bustle and alienation of Toronto, the record featured a band at the height of its craft; its thirteen tracks were recorded in just one day, but come off as a perfectly polished meditation on an American Empire at war with everyone and everything. The record seemed to tap directly into the absurdity of Bush-era idiocy and violence, and the folly that a generation was striding arrogantly into.

Unlike it’s predecessor, 'Bidet' turned the anger into a sublime joke; Shipley lamented the attack on women’s reproductive rights by imagining George W. Bush looking for a back-alley coat-hanger abortion (“Rovie Wade”) and advised the sun to stop shining in Arab skies, lest it be labeled a terrorist and bombed by American F-16s (“Sun Oh Sun.”) In a world so screwed up, ridiculing the bad guys seemed like the only way to cope, and the glowing response to the record seemed to confirm that.

The mainstream radio popularity of “…Sam Katz,” a clever polemic aimed at the mayor of Winnipeg's continued use of carcinogenic pesticides in residential nieghbourhoods, indicated that there was a real appetite for political critique that came with a wink and a nod. Katz's office refused to comment on the song and the Winnipeg Sun - a nominally Katz-supporting paper - called 'Happy Bidet' "one of 2007's best local releases."