Description
**THIS IS A VINYL LP**
Release Date: 2024
Label: Dead Oceans
Track List
Side A
- Fifteen Fifty-three
- May Ninth
- Ada Jean
- Farolim De Felgueiras
- Pon Pón
- Todavía Viva
Side B
- Juegos Y Nubes
- Hold Me Up (Thank You)
- Caja De La Sala
- Three From Two
- A Love International
- Les Petits Gris
Notes
Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, A La Sala (“To the Room” inSpanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, anddoing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctitythat is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald“DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music.If 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio LP Khruangbin made withoutcollaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musicalreputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morningafter. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the companyof the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimaloverdubs. It’s a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’svision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A LaSala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy withthe future in mind.
The trio’s collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing itin Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the bandcontinues to sound like no one but itself. A cascade of crispmelodies emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancinggently around Laura Lee’s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles,while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwaveringdance-floor on which all this movement takes place. Yet there’s afreshness to A La Sala’s instrumental interactivity, less concernedwith getting further out than going deeper in, a profound desire tocelebrate the world’s external wonders. Where prior albums strivedtowards music’s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound likebeloved intimacies. Here, Khruangbin’s sonic touch-points —whether spaghetti-western film scores (on “Fifteen Fifty-Three”),West African discos (on “Pon Pón”), G-funk fantasias (“TodavíaViva”), living room dancing moments (the first single, “A LoveInternational”), or even ambient found-sounds (on “Farolim deFelgueiras and throughout the album”) — are ingrainedcharacteristics. This is who they are! Unique and huge (andgrowing), ambitious and driven.
