Kiwi Jr.
Blowin’ Up
K/PERRENIAL
Listening to the new Kiwi Jr. record feels like hearing your friend with a dark sense of humor crack a joke that makes you wonder whether he was ever kidding to begin with. The Toronto band’s lead singer and lyricist Jeremy Gaudet has historically been at his best when he was at his snarkiest, as on Kiwi’s 2021 sophomore album Cooler Returns, with its jocular jangle pop and razor-wire wit. Now, on a fourth album of catchy quips about crime and accident scenes—settings where unspeakable things have happened, or will soon take place—the imagery feels less like light-hearted procedural stuff and more like grisly noir. “One day you’ll come through my sliding door / And see the blood on the kitchen floor,” Gaudet predicts on one track. “Wouldn’t it be just like us / To find some way to drown / In a ’65 Chevy Impala with the top down?” he cracks on another. Later in that same song comes the kicker: “I have to roll my eyes to hide a single tear / From the passenger side of a Mercury Mountaineer.”
All of that hits late in the listening, though. Before it becomes a haunting recontextualization, Blowin’ Up is a return to form. On Kiwi Jr.’s last album, 2022’s Chopper, they took a stylistic detour, drowning the record’s still impressively catchy songs in overbearing synths and vocal echo—a bleary-eyed, after-hours atmosphere that made the words feel distant. Blowin’ Up starts with classic chiming guitar arpeggios, bringing Kiwi back down to earth and into focus. Even compared to Cooler Returns, the production sounds sharp and organic, offering all the players a share of the spotlight. Exhibit A: Mike Walker’s clap-along bass and Brohan Moore’s drum break on “Pure Michigan.” Exhibit B: the noisy guitar blow-up on the title track.
Blowin’ Up addresses break-out success, albeit in the band’s usual winking way (“When you first heard we’re blowin’ up / Could you believe it?” Gaudet smiles on the title track). But while the songs themselves aren’t any more pop-oriented than before, the record is definitely Kiwi Jr.’s most emotionally explosive work, as the moments of humor tend to burst into sentimentality. On “Pure Michigan,” Gaudet makes travel slogans sound like sweet nothings, vowing “I am yours to explore, and open for business at last,” as the band takes off into an oxytocin rush of an outro. “Caught in the Wild” is their new best slow dance, ending on a classic Kiwi quip (“I wouldn’t call it a circus, just a couple of clowns”) segueing into a career-best guitar solo, where each sustained note stretches out and breaks up before fading into feedback over desolate piano.
Gaudet’s storytelling remains opaque, but he’s developed a talent for well-placed images that tell entire stories in a few lines. Sometimes that takes the form of an eye roll: Opener “Photos of the Reenactment” begins with a perfect first glimpse of its quiet small-town setting, where the most exciting thing to happen is a crane lifting a horse out of a swimming pool. Other times, you can clearly see the single tear rolling down Gaudet’s cheek, as in the parting lines of closer “Landscape with Limousine.” After nightmares, cocaine afternoons, and a Thanksgiving hospital stay, there’s distortion, drumrolls, more drumrolls, and one last sobering tableau of recovery and loss: “Now I drink decaf coffee, non-alcoholic beer,” he sings, “And I can see the cars parked in front of your house from here.” I have to roll my own eyes two or three times to get through it.
