Kiwi Jr.’s debut Football Money may have given the impression in places that it was a little fingers and thumbs, but it sounded no worse for it.
Indebted to the bookish nineties’ slacker rock of Pavement and Sebadoh – and by extension moving alongside Parquet Courts and latterly Rolling Blackouts, Coastal Fever – it steered through a territory which has become somewhat, if only by dint of numbers, under-represented in the last few years.
One of the reasons for the musical deforestation is that these sort of languorous nerd-outs are much harder to pull off successfully than it first sounds; in that and other ways Cooler Returns has more riding on it than the Canadian quartet’s self-released first shot.
Not that on first listen you would necessarily recognise this: still on point are their rhythmic jolt and verbal switchbacks, oblique poetry like, ‘now they’ve called the bikers off/there’s no threat of violence soon/you work for Microsoft/I scrape the wallpaper off in the new guest bedroom’, as delivered by singer Jeremy Gaudet on the frothy opener Tyler.
Kiwi Jr. remain this goofily off-kilter throughout, having fun with it across a dozen tracks slotted economically into thirty-seven minutes that pass a little too fast. The title-track for instance neatly reprises The Modern Lovers if they’d experienced the twin vagaries of a global pandemic and having some frankly incomprehensible thought processes to write down and sing.
On Maid Marian’s Toast, they delve further and more explicitly than is perhaps wise into an arson attack committed against a local fast food joint and the insurance fraud which came after it. Please write in if you’re still following all of this.
The obvious pitfall – of silly ideas collapsing in on themselves and forming little more than a niche located right up their collective asses – is worth flagging here, because it’s one they swerve, either by accident or design on tracks like Highlights Of 100, the genteel country-rock of Only Here For A Haircut and Omaha’s blue collar, jukebox punk.
The notes that accompany Cooler Returns hint at there being a point to all this managed absurdity, but having a purpose when your demeanour is naturally ‘cocktails by the empty pool of an abandoned motel’ doesn’t really suit. Undecided Voters sounds great, in tone like a long buried early Blondie out-take, but if it’s about politics at all, then there’s no discernible thread amongst topics which inexplicably take in 2018’s fire at the Glasgow School Of Art.
Even as a bystander, it seems though that all of this fuzz and playful pinching almost certainly makes sense to Kiwi Jr.. And as we draw to a close in this ballroom of ideas unconstrained by the perpetual gloom of the early 20s, finale Waiting In Line is Kiwi Jr. at their most direct and melodic, a last call shout with a soulful undertow which would be at home in 1981 or 2021, depending on where best the opportunity for simple relief presented itself.
Cooler Returns is less awkward than its predecessor – and that’s alright. On it, Kiwi Jr. are still geeky upstarts, but the journey finds them taking their word soup to new levels of tune-filled glee.
