Day 314: Khruangbin — Con Todo el Mundo

Today I wanted a nice, mellow album to chill to, so I thought I’d tackle a band that I’ve been meaning to listen to for a while now: the psychedelic funk trio Khruangbin.

Album cover courtesy of Dead Oceans

Khruangbin are from Houston consisting of bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer and drummer Donald "DJ" Johnson. They were formed in 2010 after Speer and Johnson met while playing in a church gospel band, and they added Ochoa to the group after meeting through mutual friends. The band name means “airplane” in Thai, and just in case you want to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of your cultured hipster friends, it’s pronounced KRUNG-bin.

Con Todo el Mundo was released in 2018 as the band’s second album, and it consists of a collection of instrumental songs spanning a variety of genres that’s perfect to have on for setting an atmosphere – it’s not so attention-grabbing that you have to focus on it, but it’s also not mellow enough to fade into the background. Instead, every second of it is interesting but not overpowering. There’s the aforementioned elements of funk and psychedelia, but there’s also so much more to it, with influences spanning genres like surf rock, Iranian pop, dub and gospel.

I had them written down on a list somewhere but I didn’t think I’d actually listened to them before, however I definitely recognised “August 10”. It’s one of the better ones in an already great album. The band explained the concept of how that song came about in an NPR article:

The first song we ever wrote as Khruangbin was a song called "August 12," off our debut album. It's a really meaningful song for us, and we wanted something of the spirit of it to come with us into this second album. So we listened to it backwards, learned to play it in reverse, then added a few new ideas into it that reflected who we are as a band now.

We recorded it nearly exactly six years later, and it's become this connective tissue between the two records, a kind of reminder to us about how far we've come together.

“Let’s play our first song backwards and see where that takes us” is a very cool way to honour where they came from, but I’d expect nothing less from an extremely cool band. Con Todo el Mundo is going into the rotation and I’m also keen to listen to every single thing they’ve ever made. I’m always in the market for albums that you can whack on to have a nicer day, and this is definitely one of them. It’s a 9/10, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they had a 10 in their discography.