Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

The Kongos brothers are in the control booth of the family’s basement studio. It was here, in 2011, that they cut the breakthrough single that is their calling card. “Come With Me Now” had already begun its ascent of the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, where it spent five weeks at No. 1, when Epic Records signed them, re-releasing the self-released “Lunatic” album in early 2015.

They’ve invested a lot of time in this Paradise Valley basement since September, when they came in off the road and started working on the followup to “Lunatic” in earnest, each brother contributing songs and co-producing with drummer Jesse Kongos also engineering.

Johnny Kongos, the brother who wrote “Come With Me Now” and supplied the attention-grabbing accordion intro, says, “I think our hope with this album is to try and convert a lot of the ‘Come With Me Now’ people into Kongos fans. Because it’s not a problem but it’s been our kind of issue that we’re trying to adjust. If people know one song, we’d like them to know more.”

“Take It from Me,” the first single from “Egomaniac,” is well on its way to becoming the brothers' second major hit. In its seventh week on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, it’s No. 11 with a bullet.

“At this point,” bassist Dylan Kongos says, “we’ll take a two-hit wonder.”

“No-hit wonder,” adds guitarist Danny Kongos, with a laugh, “was the first obstacle.”

The birth of Kongos

The youngest of four Kongos brothers, Danny was born in South Africa. The other three were born in London and moved to South Africa, by Dylan’s estimate, when he was 1 or 2.

They grew up surrounded by music as the children of John Kongos, a South African-born musician who enjoyed two Top 5 U.K. pop hits in the early ‘70s — "He's Gonna Step on You Again," which served as the foundation for a Happy Mondays single, “Step On,” in the '90s, and “Tokoloshe Man.” Over time, he got more into the production side of things.

As Jesse says, “After he had a few hits, he kind of shied away from touring. But he loved the studio.”

So he built one and started producing, sometimes just letting the studio run on its own, especially after having kids.

Among the points of interest on their father’s resume, he programmed the Fairlight computer on Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” for producer Mutt Lange, a fellow South African transplant.

“They worked together a lot,” Jesse says. “And my dad had one of the few Fairlight computers, which is, like, the first sequencing computer ever. So they sampled these drums and my dad was running the computer and the programming of it.”

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Moving to Paradise Valley

When the family left South Africa and moved to Paradise Valley in 1996, they built the basement studio where the brothers learned their craft and cut their latest album.

“Look, he was a gearhead,” Jesse says. “He always had to have the latest piece of gear. And he was into making music with computers before it was really a thing. So when we moved to the States, he built a studio, got a ProTools rig. We eventually moved to Digital Performer, but he got us in the mindset of learning our gear. He said, ‘Look, you can go to school. We can pay for you to go to college. Or you can come spend time in the studio.’ That was the mentality in his ear. ‘Don’t go to school. Get a job in a studio. Bring the engineer tea and eventually you’ll learn how to use the studio.’ ”

All four brothers attended Chaparral High School, but only Johnny and Jesse tried college.

“And we didn’t finish, either of us,” says Jesse, who went to ASU for a year and a half.

“We wanted to be in music. We knew that. Johnny and I were playing in jazz groups. At the same time, we would drive there, sit in English 101, which was pretty much high school English all over again. And it started to feel like a waste of time. It had no relevance. We weren’t academically minded. None of us wanted to do the seven years of college and get this degree and that career. So it became an interference with our pursuit of music.”

The younger brothers never made it that far.

“For Danny and I, the thought of finishing high school was dreadful,” Dylan says. “And then going to do more school at university after that, I couldn’t stand the thought of it.”

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First show is packed

They played their first show as Kongos at a coffee shop in Mesa in 2003. The place was packed.

“Because it was our first show ever, other than our talent show at high school,” Dylan recalls with a laugh. “We had our friends from high school. We had family. We had all these people who came out. And it was packed. So we got this sense of, ‘Oh, cool. This is what playing in a band is like.’ And after that, obviously, you have two people show up to your next shows because they were like, ‘All right, well, we went out and supported them.’ But that gave us a sense of how much fun it would be to go out and play in a band.”

Of course, they had their parents’ blessing.

The brothers were always “extremely aware,” Jesse says, of just how fortunate they were.

“Our dad was in the music business. We had access to an amazing facility and an amazing mentor in Dad. It felt like it would have been a sin to not at least give it a shot because not many people find themselves in a situation like that.”

As Johnny says, the reaction of a lot of parents whose children express interest in doing what the Kongos brothers are doing is more along the lines of, “That’s nice. As long as you go to college and just do it on the side.”

“With our dad, there was none of that,” he says. “He didn’t care. He said, ‘If you’re gonna do this, do it properly, though.’ ”

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Getting down to business

And so they went to work and honed their craft, releasing their first album, simply titled “Kongos,” in 2007. That did not spawn a major breakthrough.

“Fast forward to 2010,” Dylan says. It’s now seven years after that triumphant coffee-shop performance. “And nothing is happening. Money is flowing out in terms of recording and touring and all that. You’re like, ‘What the f—k are we doing?’ ”

There was a lot of asking of that question, Dylan says, from 2009 to 2011.

“We’d basically recorded ‘Lunatic,’ ” he says. “Or a lot of ‘Lunatic.’ We’d written the songs. We had started to play them live. We were sending a lot of the songs to record labels and radio DJs and getting nothing back.”

“We almost got signed,” Johnny says with a laugh, “by Universally Rejected.”

By the time they were nearing the end of the “Lunatic” sessions, Dylan says, “We were saying stuff like ‘Two more albums. We’re doing two more albums.' ”

They even thought about changing their name. But then “Lunatic” started to happen, gaining traction here in Phoenix when a DJ on a small but influential independent station, KWSS-FM (93.9), started spinning their record.

As Jesse recalls, “Beef Vegan started playing us in 2011. And obviously it’s a small station with not a lot of power, but it had a core listenership and we were like, ‘All right, there’s this guy Beef Vegan. Let’s send him our songs.’ Then, he tweeted that he was gonna spin it. So we listened and he was, like, raving about it.”

With Vegan’s support, their shows in Phoenix started getting bigger, and as Jesse says, “We were like, ‘Oh, so people hear our music and then they come to the show? That’s a good sign.’ ”

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Connecting with radio listeners

Vegan says Kongos did something no other act had done on that station: connect with a majority of the audience.

“We're a smaller station and we were still in our infancy then,” he says. “But they were able to connect and draw over 70 percent of our audience, which is unheard of. What instantly set them apart to me was they were incomparable to anything we were playing yet fit like a glove. I knew they were the real deal.”

Getting a foothold on one station meant the world to Kongos.

“If you can connect with one audience,” Johnny says, “there’s always the potential for connecting with another audience. It’s just a matter of reaching those other people and obviously it’s such a giant country. We just knew, ‘OK, so it’s a process that we have to figure out how to crack. It’s not that we have a faulty product.’ We know the music clicks with a certain amount of people. We just need to get to 10 million of those people and we’ll get our little percentage of people that like it.”

Before that initial acceptance, as Danny recalls with a laugh, “There’s that kind of ‘Are we the guys on “American Idol” who don’t realize? Is it possible we’re just entirely lacking self-awareness?’ ”

And then what had happened in Phoenix start to happen in South Africa, only bigger.

“Then it felt like OK, we’re not crazy,” Jesse says. “We might have a career here.”

As Danny recalls, “We had an entire radio spreadsheet of hundreds or thousands of radio stations around the world. We had managers. We had label contacts. We had booking contacts. We created a six- or seven-page spreadsheet of all these emails. And none of them responded.”

Then they sent an email to South African stations. And the program director at 5FM responded.

“It’s effectively the BBC for South Africa,” Jesse says. “It’s a national broadcasting radio station and TV station. And he said, ‘I love the song. I’m gonna play it.’ 5FM broadcast, at the time, to 2 million people at any given time.”

The station played “I’m Only Joking.” And Kongos blew up overnight.

“Immediately we just saw this influx of people finding us on Facebook,” Jesse says. “That started an entire career for us.”

“I’m Only Joking” was the first of seven South African hits for Kongos.

“So we’re clicking,” Jesse says. “And then we came back to the States after touring the s--t out of South Africa and nothing happened for another year.”

Catching on in the U.S.

In the meantime, they’d already started working on the album that would gradually turn into “Egomaniac.” That’s when things started happening here in the States.

Their label, Tokoloshe Records, initially pushed “I’m Only Joking” based on how the single had performed on KWSS and 5FM.

But then a DJ named Nerf heard something special in “Come With Me Now” and started spinning it in Denver on KTCL-FM

“And it got one of the biggest reactions for his station that they’d ever seen,” says Dylan. “He and a few other guys are very influential in the Clear Channel chain because he’s kind of like an 'I’ll do what I want' kind of DJ.”

When Clear Channel saw how the song was performing in Denver, Dylan says, “it just exploded. That was in a matter of a week or two.”

With that, “Come With Me Now” began the fastest climb to No. 1 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart by an unknown artist since 2003, when Evanescence took “Bring Me to Life” to the top.

The only downside to their platinum breakthrough is they had to set aside the new material to fan the flames of their slow-burning single.

“A lot of these songs had already been written or were in the process of demo-ing because there was that lag between the success in South Africa and the success in America,” Jesse says. “So there was about a year there where we were still trying to get momentum here and nothing really happening. And we thought, ‘Let’s write new songs in the meantime.’ Then ‘Come With Me Now’ blew up and we chased that around for about 18 months.”

Pressure for the second single

The other downside of such a breakthrough is it makes it hard to get another single off the ground.

As Johnny says, “If the first single does go huge and starts to cross to different formats like Top 40 and Hot AC, it just extends the life so much, it makes it difficult to push a second single. You’re competing with yourself.”

Another big concern was coming up with something that would build on the momentum of that single without sounding like a sequel.

As Johnny explains it, “We wanted to separate ourselves a little bit from that and just kind of bridge the gap to the new album, which is kind of going in a new direction. We didn’t want to kind of jump there off the bat. But ‘Take It from Me’ kind of bridges that gap.”

It’s an obvious choice for a single if bridging the gap was the game plan. Written by Jesse, the drummer, who also sings lead vocals, the song tops a pulsating dance beat with a commanding accordion riff that's sure to speak to anyone who came on board with "Come With Me Now," a chant-along chorus, a pitch-shifted vocal hook, hiccups in all the right places and a brilliant slide-guitar lead. It’s quintessentially Kongos, yet it suggests a new direction.

And as Johnny says, “Also it kind of epitomizes ‘Egomaniac,’ the concept.”

It’s not technically a concept album, but there is a unifying theme.

“Egomaniac was a word that came up some time in the discussion a year ago,” Jesse says. “We were all writing songs separately. That’s how we work. And we would come down to the studio occasionally and play our new songs to each other and there was a definite theme growing. I think Danny said the word and we thought, ‘That could be an album title.’ And once that idea started to live in us a while, it helped us pick songs for the album because it was a cohesive theme. It’s not that all the songs are about boastfulness, you know, or other traits you would associate with egomania. It looks at it from various angles.”

They also took a good hard look at radio and what might work for Kongos there.

As Jesse says, before they had their breakthrough, they thought radio was dying.

“We thought, ‘No one listens. Is it really that important?’ Then we got on radio and realized, yes, it is that important. It got us to the point where we could go into a city that we’d never been to and fill a room. There’s a fine line between tailoring your music to radio and picking songs you think will work on radio.”

Leveraging pop, hip-hop

Among the advantages the brothers have over a lot of up-and-coming rock acts is they see the value in pop radio.

“We were really influenced a lot by pop and hip-hop,” Danny says. “Pop production is always pushing stuff forward.”

His brothers agree.

“There’s great songwriting in the alternative world,” Dylan says. “But in terms of production it’s always years behind the pop and hip-hop world. They might perceive it as not cool and then you’ll hear an alternative or rock song come out and it’s got the same production, the same sound.”

The only difference, as Danny says with a laugh, is that it’s eight years later.

Jesse didn’t want to wait that long.

“It’s like it’s OK to use those techniques now,” he says. “Enough time has passed. A lot of people will criticize pop music or the songwriting and I think songwriting is where very often it does fall down. But in terms of production, they have the best, most expensive engineers and people thinking forward in terms of production on those records. So there’s a lot of interest there for us from a technical standpoint.

" ‘Come With Me Now’ and ‘Lunatic’ and the success we had really helped us financially. We invested a lot of it back into the studio. We bought new gear. Instead of going and paying for an expensive studio, we decided to upgrade ours. And even though most people will hear it on an MP3 or an iPod, we care about the sound.”

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The Kongos sound

As for the new direction, Jesse does his best to sum it up.

“There’s a certain essence, I think, in most of our recordings,” he says. “We call it the Kongos sound. And it’s a little bit patting yourself on the back but we do feel like we have an identity on our recordings. And if a song doesn’t have it, we try and put it on it. Unless it’s absolutely forced. And so the new songs definitely have that same essence. But we’re becoming more experimental with sound, a little bit. We try to break some of our previous rules.”

They want to sound like 2016, Jesse says. “We love vintage music and vintage production. We have a lot of vintage gear. But we don’t want to pretend we’re living in another world. Those records have been made already. We don’t need to make them again.”

And as Danny is quick to point out, “Those were new at the time. I think people forget that. All the old stuff they like? At the time, that was new. So people weren’t in that kind of nostalgic mood when they were making this now-vintage music. They wanted to do something fresh.”

That’s all the brothers have been chasing in their basement since September, really. And whatever else they manage to accomplish with this album, they’ve already achieved that elusive goal. It’s something fresh that manages to push the envelope while channeling the spirit of the sound that made their music matter in the first place.

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