Duff Review: King Kong 4 "More Than Just a Plate Full" Single

Winterbeard Records
Two-track digital download
2017

(Review by Steve Shafer)

Given the unbelievably disastrous times we live in (at least here in America), it's hard for me not to think that the kids-learn-bigotry-at-home lyrics of King Kong 4's fantastic "Profile Of A New Elite" are anything but a blunt commentary on the current American president's pernicious and brazenly open cultivation of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and their despicable ilk ("Well, boys it's not unlike your father to be hateful/So, eat up because it's not polite to be ungrateful/Deep under every home there's buried a secret/Daddy's digging them out, should they think to keep it/Every member of every family is guilty/Oh, guilty/It's a guilt that is not allowed..."). Then again, it could just be about the awesome power parents have to raise either good and decent human beings or menaces to society.

"Speaking for the Skeptics" is a charming--if melancholy--song told through a paranormal lens about unrequited love with a telephone psychic ("The medium is love/The message is extrasensory/Because you won't even look at me /Clairvoyance has its charm, you said/So does telekinesis, my dear/Use it to let me know you're here/I have had enough/J.B Rhine, or Mirabelli/Well, they might have seen the time/or the love that I'm sending you/But then you won't read my mind/What's the word that I'm searching for/When it's you I want to find/Trying to make that connection/But you're always on the line"). It reminds me of a sticker on a lamppost I see every day on the way to work: "The only magic I still believe in is love."

These are incredible songs (think late 70s Elvis Costello/Joe Jackson meets The Specials) by a stellar band that many more ska fans should make a point to know (and will then love!).

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Want more King Kong 4? Read The Duff Guide to Ska reviews of their There's Not Much That You or I Can Do About It and You Like Awake EPs.

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