Kiwi Jr.’s fourth album, Blowin’ Up, radiates a frantic, bottom-of-the-ninth hopefulness. After releasing three albums in four years, including two on Sub Pop, Blowin’ Up follows the group’s longest gap between records; you get the sense they’re making this one count.
As on those previous records, the songs on Blowin’ Up are stuffed with guitar licks, and singer and guitarist Jeremy Gaudet crams as many words as possible into every breath. But here, the Canadian quartet finally gets more explosive: “All signs point to it that pretty soon, baby/We’re about to blow up,” Gaudet sings on the title track, capturing the album’s simultaneous themes of frustration and ambition.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Kiwi Jr. has always sat on the rowdier side of jangle pop—less pretty and more Pavement—but on Blowin’ Up, their sound is more percussive and propulsive than ever. Even the album’s most chipper moments have an edge. The title track revolves around a cutesy keyboard melody—the kind of thing a stadium organist might vamp before rolling into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—until it drops into a pounding, blown-out halftime. On “Stage Names,” siren-like guitars glide up and down, casting a police-light warning on Gaudet’s depictions of a house show. “Hard Drive, Ontario” begins with five seconds of pure shrieking feedback. There’s a real exasperation to the way the band plays on Blowin’ Up that adds a gritty dimension to their typically amicable guitar-pop.
Some of this newly muscular sound is the result of working with fresh collaborators. 2022’s Chopper suffered from a synth-ladden, often mushy production that softened the jabs of Gaudet’s playfully sarcastic lyrics. For Blowin’ Up, Kiwi recorded in Detroit with Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck, and the album features a roster of Michigan indie-rock stalwarts like Fred Thomas and Protomartyr’s Joe Casey and Greg Ahee. Kerri Maclellan, of the reigning jangle-pop heavyweights Alvvays, plays keyboards on two tracks. (Though this is not the first association between the two bands—Kiwi Jr. guitarist Brian Murphy played in Alvvays until 2021.) On Alvvays records, Maclellan’s keys add a spectral shadowiness to the production, but her touch here is more subtle: a quiet drone that just barely brightens the strummy “Photos of the Reenactment.” On “World Like Polly,” Margaux Bouchaudon, of French pop band En Attendant Ana, undercuts the song’s sneering tone with lilting harmonies in the chorus.
As a lyricist, Gaudet threads together life’s minor disappointments through sports references, anecdotes about shitty bars, and other cultural ephemera, like a Canadian MJ Lenderman who’s (fittingly) really into hockey instead of basketball. In true Canuck fashion, he rhymes “Maple trees” with “Red Wing retirees” and disses the “second worst bar in Southern Ontario.” But on Blowin’ Up, he sounds so bitter that he threatens to lose the affability of his everydayman references. (Another interpretation of the album’s title: reaching the end of one’s mental fuse.) His character studies have soured—where his protagonists were once plucky and rambunctious, they now demonstrate naive foolishness, like the titular character on “World Like Polly.” On “Hard Drive, Ontario,” Gaudet spits out the line, “Did you lose your parlay on the fourth-quarter pick 6?” with utter contempt.
