-----KKDD REVIEWS-----
Dusted Magazine
Kind of a step away for Dekorder to go for a pop band with actual songs that fit into a current trend, but KKDD aren’t your average Animal Collective rip-off, nor are they content to drink downstream from those fucking art school Juggalos in Man Man, with whom they share a city. In the ways that they break noisy pop down into pieces and parts that explode into mirthful beauty – all without taking away from the elements that started the songs – they’ve created a really joyous sound, musically challenging and instrumentally dense, like that one last awesome Teenage Filmstars record that never got made. Very impressive work.
20jazzfunkgreats
I recall teasing you about the eventual presence of one of Philly’s finest, King Kong Ding Dong, in the pages of this your most dedicated blog. Well, here you go, they have a new album out, it goes by the name of Youth Culture Index and you can download it for free here. Do it, but also buy the CD because what they do deserves strong and enthusiastic support.
And what is it that they do?
They craft epic pieces of psychedelic pop music- if Espers broke into Phil Spector’s manor somewhere in the hills of LA, they would eventually get lost in the labyrinthine and baroque corridors of this haunted place, tired and hungry fall asleep in whichever bedroom they happened to stumble upon first, surrounded by statues of grimacing satyrs and hyeratic nymphs, and they would sleep, and they would dream of the revenants of black ghostgirls with astonishing afros shimmying across the room to the tribal stomp of a heartbreaking ballad. And when they woke up they would go back to their van, grab their instruments and make music beautiful like this. This is what they do.
Impose Magazine
On first listen, King Kong Ding Dong's Youth Culture Index manages to hit that elusive sweet spot that roves between that which sounds sparkly and new and that which is extracted from black market Animal Collective syndicates and dispensed to college kids wholesale.
They run a similar gamut between charming studio tricks and ragged lo-fi crackle, with tracks running in the red followed by quasi-electronic, tampered guitarscapes. The thing was recorded loosely over more then a year throughout Philly "bedrooms, basements, and other amorphous dwellings," and with members of Sunny Day in Glasgow ("we are the band," they explained), they exude an easy kind of sound-play that remains novel while being completely familiar.
