CANADA IS ALSO THE SHIT!
[Video][Website]
[5.82]
Katherine St Asaph: Canadian girls, best in the world. You can travel that wo-orld, but nothing comes close to the mumblemumble coast, ’cause I wish they all could be Canadian girls. But workmanlike, heteronormative T-shirt bait knows no borders.
[5]
John Seroff: Proof that there’s no fetishism so absurd (“she can look sexy in a tuque”?) that it can’t be rendered utterly adorable when presented with a twang. “Canadian Girls” is mercifully short and definitely good for a chuckle the first time or two through, but it morphs into a staler “Holiday Road” pretty fast.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Of course the chords and arrangement define “generic” (and get a load of that guitar solo), and the chorus lyrics deserve a second or third polish, but Brody, amiable and crinkly, sounds committed, especially when he places special emphasis on the things he loves most: Moosehead beer, coffee made on the stove.
[5]
Anthony Easton: As much as I would like to pretend all of Canadian culture is Queen West hipsters, Vancouver photographers, and the women who take their clothes off on St Catherine Street in Montreal, and as much as I really don’t care about hockey (until playoff beards mean strapping young lads all look like lumberjacks), buffalo plaid, or Ron McLean, I am not made of stone. Moosehead is one of the few beers I drink, Gordon Lightfoot is a national treasure, and I can sing along to Stompin’ Tom. This is mostly about patriotism, and about the erotic power of toques and flannel, with a couple of points added for the competent guitar and one more point for Brody’s smooth as Crown Royal voice. That said, “Manada” might be the better song.
[9]
Andrew Ryce: I can’t hate anything that contains the line “she looks sexy in a toque” sung so earnestly. This is like a Molson Canadian commercial stretched out to four minutes, so generic that Canada doesn’t even have a destination like “New York or Paris, France,” reduced solely to its eponymous girls. I just have one question: where the hell does that accent come from?
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: I tend to go swollen-hearted and misty-eyed at expressions of patriotism from any country but my own; but the cognitive dissonance between all the Southern sonic signifiers and the plus-Northern lyrical ones is too much, and the part of me that wants to flag-wave along just ends up confused.
[6]
Iain Mew: I saw a London gig last year by Japanese singer Kanon Wakeshima during which she asked the audience something along the lines of “What defines England?” and got a few embarrassed shouts of “fish and chips” and “the Queen”. Even given the time to think, I’m not sure that I could have offered much better. When talking about national identity, it’s easy to slip into clichéd and not particularly useful shorthand. That’s no excuse for Dean Brody doing exactly that in this song, with a list of undeveloped Canadian reference points that I could probably have come up with having never been there. If you want to express your preference for Canadian girls over those foreign ladies and their accents, you’re going to need to come up with a more convincing reason than a shared enjoyment of hockey. Also, I’m never going to be too fond of any song that sounds this much like Stereophonics.
[3]
Sabina Tang: Dean Brody, I suspect, classifies French Canadian girls as halfway to foreign. I don’t mean it in a huffy way, just that one thinks of this sort of thing as covering a territory starting west of here. It inspires the same mildly fond cringe as old Due South reruns, or anything televised involving beavers; like watching a relative act cheesy at a family get-together. Also, shenanigans on the “not admitting she watched Degrassi” line, which is sheer nonsense. Either you watched it proudly, or you didn’t watch it at all.
[5]
Michaela Drapes: I want to hate this, I do. It’s trite, it’s terribly clichéd, the production’s just so-so, it’s a retread of a million songs on this very same subject, and for crying out loud, I’M NOT EVEN CANADIAN. And yet, I find it oddly irresistible. Hockey! Toques! Gordon Lightfoot! Degrassi! The red and white! (Hockey!) Moosehead beer! (Hockey!) Was there a mention of loonies, or did I miss it?
[6]
Brad Shoup: Brody puts some poignant pulls on the melody and gives a reverent hush to some odd words — you gotta hear how he sings “Degrassi”. It’s a little doofy that Brody thinks his country’s women are awesome solely due to the influence of their male relatives, but on the balance he means well. If you turned up the amps you’d have a nice novelty power-pop tune. I wonder if the Groovie Ghoulies could pull off the pronunciation of “Tuktoyaktuk”.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: The best collection of Canadian cultural ephemera I’ve heard since The Weakerthans’ “Tournament of Hearts,” and twice as crowd-pleasing. Even if it fails to mention poutine, at least it finds room for Degrassi and Moosehead. I’ll only stereotype as far as Brody does himself: I’m charmed by how gosh-darn nice this is. He sounds like such a polite young man, eh?
[7]