Circulated by Mint Records, already recreated at high volume on stages across Canada, labeled “Delightful as fuck” by NOW Magazine and “Naive enough to be charming” by Exclaim, Toronto’s Kiwi Jr. presents Football Money: 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, Football Money 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.
Football Money will come out worldwide on January 17th, following a March 2019 Canadian release on Mint Records, best known for releasing early recordings by the New Pornographers, Neko Case and Lou Barlow.
Built from the clay of the day-to-day – as attentive to the complexities of a sporting salary cap as to the mystery of love; to the burden of Toronto rent as the reality of ruin – it’s a record of modern creation, lyrics text-wrapped in Excel spreadsheet cells, Rickenbackers detuned to the frequency of a blue-screen migraine. Kiwi kritiks delineate influences like sections of the cow – the rump: JANGLE; the loin: PUNK – and seem set on referring Football Money to the criminal court with the Modern Lovers and the Kinks cc’d but ultimately unable to prove intent. But Kiwi Jr. conjure what we think about when we think about Patricia Highsmith paperbacks, Peel Session Comps, and pitchers of cheap domestic: Football Money is a laser cold hit.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the official music video for “Gimme More”, one of the most raucous tracks on Football Money. Bringing to mind the garage rock revival of the early 2000s with a 70s glam vibe, the song is a jangly rocker that features shouted group harmonies with an infectious chorus. The camera roams loosely through a Toronto dive and we see the band playing in various hallways, bars and stages throughout. The song is accentuated with flourishes of electric guitar, offering up a refreshing reminder that straightforward rock and roll bands are still alive and well.
Sean Foreman, who directed the video, says that they “wanted the video to feel like it was based off dream logic. Things don’t make sense, the band keeps popping up, rooms are oddly connected somehow, it’s nonsense but at the same time there seems to some undercurrent of reason guiding things.”
The band members add their own backstory:
“It was shot mostly at our favourite bar in Toronto – Black Dice Cafe. It’s a rockabilly bar and though kiwi jr is very unhip to that scene, we tried to pay it justice by wearing leather jackets. We’ve had probably every band meeting we’ve ever had at that bar, and the owner Hidecki was nice enough to let us shoot there as long as we didn’t break anything (which we did during load in before we even started shooting). A hot fact is that Mike has one of the all-time pinball scores on the board there.”
LISTEN:
For more music and info visit kiwijr.com.
