AP Track Review
The title track of Toronto's Kiwi Jr's debut album, "Football Money" bristles with so much musical goodness. It is not only that the song comes out of the gate running at a full clip but the attack of all instruments is catchy as hell. There is a snarky quality to the sound, the bass and drums in unison tightly wound while guitars lines stair step and bend off kilter. There is a post punk proggy thing happening as well with the kind of manic padded room poetry and the realization that those in the insane asylum are not the crazy ones. For some reason I thought of the seething Fuck You attitude of the Who, the wry wink of the eye of The Kinks and the divergent post punk / indie art rock of Pavement all at once and, to me, Jeremy Gaudet's vox with his wide eyed smart melodic cadence and tones reminds me a bit of Stephen Malkmus.
Kiwi Jr hail from Toronto and are (the aforementioned) Jeremy Gaudet (vox, guitars, keys), Mike Walker (Bass, Backing vox, keys), Brohan Moore (drums, backing vox) and Brian Murphy (guitars, backing vox). The album "Football Money" drops (via Persona Non Grata Records) on January 17th, 2020.
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Robb Donker
BANDCAMP: https://kiwijr.bandcamp.com/album/football-money
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
Toronto’s Kiwi Jr. are excited to announce worldwide release of their debut album Football Money, via Persona Non Grata Records, who turned heads with Pip Blom’s debut EP in 2018.
Football Money will come out worldwide on January 17th, 2020, following a March 2019 Canadian release on Mint Records, best known for releasing early recordings by the New Pornographers, Neko Case and Lou Barlow.
All natives of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Kiwi Jr. are now based in Toronto and much of their songwriting is informed by the city that surrounds them. They have spent the last 5 years honing their craft both in the studio and live, including opening spots with Wolf Parade, New Pornographers and Alvvays.
Football Money was recreated at high volume on stages across Canada; a dispatch stitched out of fragments, a lustrous twelve-string paint-job unraveling ten booksmart tracks in under thirty minutes. A product of two years of labor, a monument to work-life balance, the record is not unattractively scarred by its circumstance: recorded by nightfall in dormant studios, friends and enemies drafted as backup singers and engineers, the LP untidily fuses the yin of work with the yang of life, chronicling a dual-existence, unkempt instrumentalists moonlighting as undercompensated administrators by the harsh fluorescent light of day, borne back ceaselessly into the Greater Toronto Area by night.
Kiwi Jr,: Rickenbackers detuned to the frequency of a blue-screen migraine, equal parts jangle and punk - a modern day Modern Lovers with the Kinks cc’d.
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