Name: Cooler Returns
Brand: Kiwi Jr

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

SP1400

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2021-02-05

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

PIAS

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0098787140019

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

SPCD1400

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0098787140026

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "0098787140026"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

SP1400X

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "SP1400X"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

White

[r17195791]

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Extended format: Yes

Limited Loser Coloured Vinyl.

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0098787140002

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1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / white

Artist

Kiwi Jr

Genre GB

Alternative / Modern

Label GB

Sub Pop

Short for "Subterranean Pop" 

The label was an outgrowth of [a=Bruce Pavitt]'s Olympia, WA based (print) fanzine, which became the well respected cassettezine of the same name. 

After his move to Seattle he ran a music column in the Seattle Rocket also called Sub Pop.

After initial forays into the record label world with a [a=Green River] 7" (not officially on Sub Pop) and the Sub Pop 100 LP, the label exploded onto the indie scene with four influential colored vinyl 7"s which included [a=Mudhoney]'s "Touch Me I'm Sick" which made the year-end top 10 playlist of nearly every music journalist in the world.

Subsequent hyping of the label in the English music press put them on the map, and grunge was born.

Label-Code is 03159; rarely found printed on releases (basically only on releases manufactured/licensed by Warner/WEA Germany)

Kiwi Jr. is a phenomenal “rock” and/or “punk” and/or “indie-rock” (whichever you like more) band from Canada. Cooler Returns is their second album, and their first for Sub Pop. Despite being a snapshot of the pandemic-infused beginnings of this decade, Cooler Returns is truly a whole lot of fun.

On Cooler Returns, Kiwi Jr. cycle through the recent zigs and looming zags of the new decade, squinting anew at New Year’s parties forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021. Put together like a thousand-piece puzzle, assembled in flow state through the first dull stretch of quarantine, sanitized singer shuffling to sanitized studio by streetcar, masked like it's the kind of work where getting recognized means getting killed, Cooler Returns materializes as a sprawling survey from the first few bites of the terrible twenties, an investigative exposé of recent history buried under the headlines and ancient kings buried under parking lots. Not so long since their debut Football Money in archaeological time, unending gray eons later in the dog years of quaran-time, spiritually antipodean Canadians Kiwi Jr return to disseminate this year's annual report to the shareholders, burying the incriminating numbers in the endless appendices of a longform narrative record, a 3,000 word tract for stakeholders to pore over. These stories - memories of Augusts past, unrepressed &amp; transcribed fast - go down easier thanks to meaningful changes enacted in 2019’s KiwiCares Pledge: delivering on a promise to transition from Crunchy to Smooth by 2021, the caveman chug of Football Money has been steamed and pressed with the purifying air of a saloon piano - operated with bow-tie untied - and a spring green side-salad of tentatively up-tempo organ taps and freshly fluted harmonica. A chronically detuned spin of the dial through swivel-chair distractions and WFH daydreams, an immersive ctrl-tab deluge cycling through popular listicle distractions like the unentombing of Richard III, or the deja vu destruction of the Glasgow School of Art, Kiwi Jr. sing this song to an indoor audience, crisscrossing canceled, every other prestige distraction source wrung dry, only songwriting remaining to deliver engrossing tales to the populace, just how I imagine it worked in the old days.

Fixing loose ingredients into a sturdy whip, Kiwi Jr. beam in live from the 9-5, striding into 2021 with a mastered brainwave that comes equally from the back room of the record store as the penalty box. And how do we, left holding this box of deliberate entanglements, sign off to those as yet uninitiated, undecided, uncertain, unseen, absent return coordinates.

Cooler Returns

Music GB

Buy Kiwi jr. - Cooler Returns (Vinyl, CD) now from Rough Trade - independent purveyors of great music, since 1976.