Khruangbin/Photo: Jackie Lee Young
Grandeur, sometimes actual, often delusional, has become the defining characteristic of many of today’s biggest musical acts. We live in a world of mega-tours, dramatic album drops, and high-concept records best characterized by their conceptual redundancy: same point, different song, repeat. The idea of band-as-brand is in no way new: Think of the Stones, the Strokes, Kiss and, dare we say, the Spice Girls. But in an era when Harvard and Berkeley offer B-school courses celebrating the commercial genius of Taylor Swift, and the phrase “get closer to your audience” has become a call to marketing arms and not a mandate to dive into the mosh pit, self-conscious self-promotion has clearly won the day.
The Houston trio Khruangbin—featuring Laura Lee Ochoa on bass, DJ Johnson on drums, and Mark Speer on guitar—seem to be having none of it. While their appeal is undoubtedly mega—to date, their albums have been streamed over 775 million times—they make music as though they’re in no hurry to please anyone but themselves.
For well over a decade Khruangbin has been compressing diverse world music sounds into experimental, deliberately background-y grooves. There’s a detached quality to the band’s music, as though they’re intentionally resisting the emotional drama and ego-driven angst and personality of so much Western popular music. What you’re feeling just now, a Khruangbin song seems to say, is only a mood, soon to pass and be replaced by the next vibe.
Even the band’s figure-out-what-it-means-if-you-need-to moniker nods to a vision that is more global than local. Khruangbin means “airplane” in Thai, a language bassist Ochoa was learning when it came time to name the band, who’ve since joked that if they knew they would ascend to such heights, they might have chosen a name that’s easier to pronounce (for the record, it’s krung-bin).
Part of Khruangbin’s appeal is how unclassifiable its sound is. On the four studio albums they’ve released since 2015, the band doesn’t just move between genres (tranquil funk, psychedelic soul, Malian folk, EDM, Americana, and, at the band’s least compelling, slightly-too-smooth jazz); it marries them. It’s a coming together of, not a competition between, sounds familiar and lesser-known. Thanks to the trio’s extraordinary musicianship, and the degree to which they seem both sonically and spiritually connected—a dynamic especially apparent during their much-celebrated live shows—their sound manages to be tight, deliberate, never forced, and always energetically fluid.
The band’s backstory is surely part of the reason why. Years before Khruangbin came to be, Speer and Johnson were fixtures at Houston’s St. John’s Downtown Church, a longstanding mecca for area musicians (including, once upon a time, a young Beyoncé) where jazz and gospel reigned supreme. Speer was and remains a world music obsessive, ever-attuned to regional musical styles, sounds and techniques, present and past. It’s part of the band’s appeal to those with encyclopedic musical knowledge, for whom citing a Khruangbin song’s influences has become something of a parlor game.
Vieux Farka Touré by Kiss Diawara, Mark Speer by Rob Williamson, Laura Lee by Donovan Smallwood, DJ Johnson by Riot Muse
It’s also one of the reasons the band is so adept at collaboration. In recent years Khruangbin has recorded with the brilliant Malian singer Vieux Farka Touré; remixed a Paul McCartney song, “Pretty Boys,” at the former Beatles’ request; and recorded two EPs with neo-soul singer Leon Bridges, a fellow Texan oft-compared to Sam Cooke. “Texas Sun,” the title track of the more successful of those EPs, is the perfect marriage of mood and momentum, a Billboard-charting record that garnered Khruangbin a Folk and Americana following. Questlove (the Roots) and David Byrne (Talking Heads) are both fans of the band.
Khruangbin’s latest release, “A La Sala”
Khruangbin’s latest release, “A La Sala,” is a return to their musical beginnings and perhaps even a rejection of the more conventionally lyrics-driven, melodic pop they experimented with on their third record, “Mordechai.” The album is an extended, desultory meandering, as tracks appear and dissolve, and we walk out of one soundscape and into another sala (or room) where music is already playing. These are songs without beginning, middle and end, devoid of verse and chorus breaks. Rhythm and groove don’t support the structure, they are the structure. You don’t listen to “A La Sala.” You go with the flow.
Speer’s Tex-Mex picking and acid-reverb guitars often provide the only melody. When we get words at all, the vocals wash over the instrumentation percussively, or sometimes like faint harmonies expressed as stray thoughts. In the subtle flamenco funk of “Pon Pon,” the whispered vocals could be a lover soft-talking in your ear, but instead dissolve into childish chants ripped off from the Mexican children’s game of chance, toma todo. It’s a quiet joke played on the very premise of lyrics as narrative and the perfect metaphor for a band that traffics in the obscure.
A standout among the album’s instrumental tracks, “Ada Jean,” leans on mournful spaghetti-western guitars and a slow-walking rhythmic groove of drums and bass. The song feels written to play over dissolving credits as a lone-surviving gunslinger walks into a soul-wearying desertscape. “Todavía Viva,” “A La Sala”’s best track, has a fat bass and channels the sexy, syncopathic French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. In an album full of songs that refuse to announce themselves, “Todavia Viva” has the temerity to stand out. Clearly the “Khruangbinvibe”—yes, that’s a thing—contains multitudes.
Perhaps Khruangbin resonates so strongly for so many because of its essential boundarylessness. It’s the underground club where we move from room to room and never lose the groove; the wide open sky that promises something better just beyond the horizon; a Texas without borders (imagine!) where disparate musical styles coexist in a global democracy of sound. It’s Khruangbin’s world now. We’re just vibing in it.
Khruangbin plays June 7-9 at the Salt Shed.
Anne K. Ream (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”) is a writer and the co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, a global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations. A frequent writer for Newcity, she is a contributor to “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” and the co-creator of Hear to Be Heard, a blues and rock benefit concert series.
R. Clifton Spargo (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”), author of the novel “Beautiful Fools,” is a novelist, short-story writer and cultural and music critic. His writings on music have appeared in Huffington Post, The Yale Review, “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan,” and regularly in Newcity. He is co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, and teaches creative writing at Yale University.
