Various Artists
Buy Nothing Day: The Album
(Independent)

Local personality, activist, and political cartoonist Ted Dave has collected together some of the best of Vancouver’s eclectic independent music community to create this “compilation” and generate awareness about the annual Adbusters-created Buy Nothing Day. The event takes place on the Friday of the American Thanksgiving Day weekend, acknowledged by retailers as the busiest shopping day in the entire year. It’s meant to “celebrate” the fact that we can change the world by how we choose to spend or not spend our hard-earned dollars.

This compilation features previously unreleased gems like Veda Hille’s cover of NoMeansNo’s epic, “The River,” and a long-lost Sarcastic Mannequins (Beez’s, from the Smugglers, original band) track, “The Smile That Costs a Fortune (Money).” Other jewels include the post-rock skronk of Proud Mary’s “No Deal, No Way, No How” and the glee-club punk anarchy of Submission Hold’s “Purchasing Power of the Paranoid and Hopeless.”

Summed up, this collection of songs is generally a good representation of what’s going on in Vancouver’s action-oriented music underground with the advent of 2002. These songs, all donated by the participating artists, are only available in the annoying Realaudio format at www.teddave.com/nothingcd.html or via the artists themselves, in limited quantities. Although the effort is truly grassroots (i.e. you can’t buy the CD, with good reason), it is a novel activism concept and a truly entertaining listen.

Spike