Description
The title makes it clear. A La Sala (To the Room 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 thats key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald DJ Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark Marko Speer approach music. Yet if 2020s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record whose ensuing post-lockdown tour enhanced the bands musical reputation far and wide, A La Sala is the measured morning after. Its a gorgeously airy album made only in the company of the groups longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It is a porthole onto the bounties powering Khruangbins vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with thefuture 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 Khruangbins stature as a commercially and critically successful group that continues to be guided by creative possibilities.
The building blocks for the albums 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbins 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, Khruangbins 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. (via Khruangbin, Bandcamp)
Label: Dead Oceans DOC357LP
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: US
Released: Apr 5, 2024
Genre: Funk / Soul
File under: Funk / Soul
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