The title makes it clear. A LA SALA (âTo the Roomâ in Spanish), the fourth studio album by Khruangbin, is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and do so on your own terms. It extends the air of mystery and sanctity thatâs key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald âDJâ Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark âMarkoâ Speer approach music. Yet if 2020âs Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record whose ensuing post-lockdown tour enhanced the bandâs musical reputation far and wide, A LA SALA is the measured morning after. Itâs a gorgeously airy album made only in the company of the groupâs longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It is a porthole onto the bounties powering Khruangbinâs vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A LA SALA scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.
It is also a response to the unique moment Khruangbin finds itself in now: following a decade spent cultivating extraordinary music paths, beginning a year when they'll perform for more people, in more iconic spaces, staging a live show that pushes a creative envelope peculiar to them alone. (Look for the band at major festivals and venues near you.) 2024 feels like both marker and pivot, cementing Khruangbinâs stature as a commercially and critically successful group that continues to be guided by creative possibilities.
Such crossroads are familiar for iconic artists throughout the rock era â your Dylans, Stevies and Bowies, up thru turn-of-the-century Radiohead, all have navigated these straits. On A LA SALA, Khruangbin also pulls exploration inward, spurning the din of the crowdâs expectations, mapping a personal direction home. The trioâs collective musical DNA and the years spent constructing it in Houstonâs local-meets-global cultural stew ensure the band carries on sounding like no one but itself. A LA SALA may in fact be Khruangbinâs purest distillation. A cascade of crisp melodies still emanates from Markoâs reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Leeâs minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJâs drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place.Â
Where prior album-by-album growth seemed to point the narratives towards musicâs polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like known intimacies. What once seemed like sonic invocations â spaghetti-western film scores, found-sounds, dancing moments more living room than rooftop disco â are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! And thereâs a freshness to the instrumental interactivity on A LA SALA thatâs less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in. That depth is not about therapeutic self-reflection, but a profound desire to celebrate the worldâs external wonders.
âI read something long ago, attributed to Miles Davis. He said, âWhen they play fast, you play slow. When they play slow, you play fast.â And it's definitely how I've approached looking at music: Don't follow the trends. And if the trend is this, then do something else.â - Marko
From the get-go, Khruangbinâs journey has been emphatically its own: a sound and visual representation with few precedents, ignoring pop expectations, relying only on internal inspirations, and a multitude of visions. Itâs a mindset of penetrating the self, connecting to the surrounding world, modeling your own life experiences. This ethos is threaded throughout A LA SALA, audible in the albumâs form and function. (Itâs even visible in the vinyl versionâs physical package, which will be released as a set of seven distinctive covers and color-sets â more on which in a sec.)Â
The building blocks for the albumâs 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbinâs creative past. Having stockpiled ideas originally set down as off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absentminded epiphanies), they began fitting those pieces together in the studio. Which parts were apt? Which could be massaged and stretched out? Which inspired new sections or rhythms or musical interactions? Once more, Khruangbinâs familial DNA kicked in. Layer-by-layer, the intimate work, rework and re-rework bore new fruit. They also brought back a strategy once foundational to their records: seeding an album with field recordings. Â
Some results fold directly into A LA SALAâs down-home feel. âThree From Twoâ and âMay Ninthâ are wistful mid-tempo numbers, with guitar melodies that reside somewhere between Bakersfield and by-the-riverside, cues that, for all its borderless inclusivity, another core Khruangbin value is being steeped in American roots. And in the landscape that music comes from. Like all albums prior to Mordechai, Marko made sure environmental sounds â natural and man-made â appeared as textures. (At times philosophically: the group recorded while cricket chirps played in their headphones, presumably for terroir.) Itâs how A LA SALA achieves such interconnected set-and-setting-ness. Â
Other results are more metaphorical, especially in Khruangbinâs flirtation with ambient spaces. The dramatically beatless âFarolim de Felgueirasâ and âCaja de la Salaâ both feature only Markoâs unmistakable guitar dueting with Laura Leeâs Moog, lightly layered with sounds of shoes on stone steps, and cicadas in an open field. The closing âLes Petits Grisâ more fully reduces and fleshes out the ambiance, with a piano and a simple single-note bass pattern, Markoâs plaintive spare guitar echoing the melody of a ballerina-turning music box. It feels an apt way of ending â as a passing of this particular moment, preparation for the next one, soon-come.Â
Even the seven different covers that adorn A LA SALAâs various vinyl editions offer a throughline from the music into Khruangbinâs current frame. Designed by the band using Markoâs multitude of travelog photos, they are windows from the bandâs living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances illuminating what is going on inside. These are also directly related to David Blackâs images of DJ, Laura Lee and Marko which accompany A LA SALA, and to Khruangbinâs live staging reinvention. Itâs all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead. Â