Nun fly with me
Canadian quartet’s second album polishes their ‘spiritually antipodean’ pop-super-smarts. By Keith Cameron.
Kiwi Jr ★★★★ Cooler Returns SUB POP. CD/DL/LP
ONE CHALLENGE facing Kiwi Jr as they embarked upon the successor to 2020’s Football Money was how to finesse that debut album’s groovy rock and drollery without losing the ramshackle charm. Years in the making, it came unburdened by preconception, casually dropping four-to-the-floor LOLs like Gimme More, wherein singer-guitarist Jeremy Gaudet drawled, “Gimme more Star Wars/Gimme open barre chords”, like Jonathan Richman fronting The Cars on a lost Postcard 45. Smart work guys – but can you do that again while people are watching?
The 125-second entirety of opening track Tyler confirms that Football Money was no fluke. It also straightaway dips deeper than before into a plangent Kinksian pool, with well-turned lyrical knots (“You work for Microsoft/I scrape the wallpaper off in the new guest bedroom”) amping the bittersweet aspect of this band’s ostensibly larkish scheme.
Now based in Toronto, Kiwi Jr originally hail from Prince Edward Island’s Charlottetown, and the pangs of relocation from small provincial city to metropolis still colour their songs, especially when a newly extended palette makes room for mournful harmonica. The R.E.M. melancholic Only Here For
A Haircut has Gaudet’s mind navigating “From the QEH to the QEW”, presumably meaning Charlottetown’s main hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Highway out of Toronto that leads eventually to the USA. Undecided Voters’ taut Wire-ish hustle notes its protagonist taking photos of Toronto’s world famous CN Tower and locally renowned Honest Ed’s department store sign, then takes a transatlantic leap to Glasgow’s fire-stricken art school. Maid Marian’s Toast, meanwhile, is a Modern Lovers-sugary farewell to a worker at “Kiwana’s canteen” – a near namesake of a Charlottetown dairy bar.
As their name wryly acknowledges, Kiwi Jr believe disclosure is the best policy in matters of artistic inspiration. No band coyly indebted to Pavement would so often reference sport – specifically Stephen Malkmus’s personal favourite tennis – while their absorption in ’80s NZ garage bubblegum now extends from the joyously scuzzy likes of The Clean (laconic VU-motorik Dodger) and 3Ds (the carnivalesque fairground organ and ostinato riff of Domino) to find its full bloom on Nashville Wedding, the album’s peak meringue: a miniconcerto of romantic mishap (“I wanna hold the minister’s hand/Strangle the jangle-pop band”) with baroque notes of The Chills fusing Maggie May and I Think We’re Alone Now.
In lesser hands, their fervent referential scree could trip over its own eloquence. But sustaining momentum near-faultlessly across 13 songs and 37 minutes, Cooler Returns proves Kiwi Jr have the skills to match their smarts. As Jeremy Gaudet yelps on the title track, “I am not American, but I feel the beat sometimes”. It’s infectious, for sure.