by Chris Hatch

On Chopper, the Toronto band pose different questions – but the songs are as strong as ever

On Kiwi Jr’s first couple of albums – 2019’s Football Money and 2021’s Cooler Returns – the challenge for every music writer was to see how long they could go before mentioning words and phrases like ‘slacker pop’, ‘abstract lyrics’, or ‘stoner vibes’. How far into a piece before your unimaginative, part-time writer (hello!) hinted that Kiwi Jr singer, Jeremy Gaudet, might sound a bit like Stephen Malkmus? How long before mentioning the poppy side of Dinosaur Jr, the sugary-sweetness of Sparklehorse, the gritty bits of Superchunk? It was a tough challenge – here were a band that sounded so much like our favourite college rock bands, like the point in a Venn diagram where smart, self-aware Gen X rock met unabashed pop music… and yet somehow sounded fresh, vital, and totally not derivative.

On Chopper, they pose a different question  – at what point do we address the elephant in the room? Namely, that Kiwi Jr at some point in the last twelve months – maybe it turned up in one of their basements, maybe it was dug out at a vintage music store, maybe it was nestled under their tree at Christmas, unwrapped with eagerness and plugged in without delay – have come into possession of a synthesiser?

Well, thankfully it’s not something we need to dwell on too long. We’ll get into it later, but, for now, all you need to know is that regardless of how Kiwi Jr have decided to augment their sound, the songwriting on Chopper is as strong as ever.

On Unspeakable Things, a climbing, whirling fairground organ gives way to a buzzy, Weezer-like melody line. On an album that (at face value) feels a little more mature and a little darker than their previous efforts, its opening track pulses with the same buoyant zest of The Spinto Band. Parasite II lurches forth with a police-siren-wail of a synth line. The Extra Sees The Film is all icy strings, cascading chimes, and moody seriousness. Later on in the record, the chorus of The Sound Of Music goes all Vampire Weekend with its dancing clavichord melody line – it’s hard not to imagine it soundtracking a Wes Anderson montage.

The net result of this change in sound is that Chopper feels like the album The Strokes could have made if only they’d ditched the rock star posturing and drug taking and taken themselves a little less seriously. Lead single, Night Vision, sounds like the product of The Shins getting Interpol and The Strokes together in a practice room and saying ‘Lads… lighten up a little!’ Kennedy Curse is Kiwi Jr at their Strokesiest – tight, punchy drums, layered guitars, and the faintest glimmering of keys. And for all the comparisons Gaudet gets to Pavement frontman, Stephen Malkmus, his distorted, half-sung vocals on The Extra Sees The Film feel like vintage Julian Casablancas.

Chopper is such a dense and playful album that it takes over a dozen or so listens before all of its left-turns, counter melodies, and pop hooks stop catching you off guard – and even then Gaudet’s gloriously wonky lyrics continue to surprise. Favourite topics return on Chopper – hit men, horses, prime-time sports… but it’s the movie biz with which Gaudet seems to have the biggest obsession. On Cooler Returns, he sang of holding the boom, learning new lines at the retreat, missing out on film school, and writing screenplays; on Chopper there are songs called The Extra Sees The Film and The Sound Of Music – Amy Adams was namechecked on Cooler Returns, and this time it’s the turn of Julie Andrews and Tony Walton.

But cinema isn’t the only section of pop culture that Gaudet plays around with – the lyrics on Chopper are a mangle of Internet-age references. Each line in isolation seems to be the set up to some film or TV scene, some conceptual idea or thought that flashes through and makes sense for just that brief moment. On Clerical Sleep, Gaudet perfectly encapsulates a feeling in such an abstract and original way that it defies comparison to any of the bands we might have lazily compared Kiwi Jr to so far – ‘they’re building this powerful magnet’ he sings, ‘to disrupt the rhythm of my heart/I run and I hide/but it’s like trying to get out of someone else’s car in the dark’.

For some corners of the music world, Chopper will be seen as Kiwi Jr’s ‘synth’ record, and while they might have wrapped their latest record up in a slightly more curious aesthetic – some kind of late-night, back-alley, sunglasses-on-even-though-it’s-dark vibe – the fact is that Chopper is yet another rock solid collection of songs, and the Toronto band’s strength as songwriters shines through the gloomy city smog as brightly as ever.

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