Following up their release of Pip Blom’s
Paycheck, another amazing debut from Persona Non Grata Records. 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…
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.
