In the weeks before seeing the mighty Khruangbin in the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House last Friday night (the first of three sold-out shows for them there, and my first time seeing them), I told several friends I wasn’t so sure how appropriate a venue it was for them.
I’m sure this might have sounded like a case of give me diamonds and I want emeralds, but it just felt too uptown or something. With their freewheeling psychedelic Texas funk, Khruangbin should be playing to a ballroom, or some other large general-admission venue with a dedicated dancefloor, like the Enmore Theatre in Newtown. Or they should be outdoors — even the forecourt at the Opera House, the stunning open-air space at the end of Bennelong Point in front of the building and right on the water, might have made more sense. When you hear Khruangbin you want to be uninhibited and dance, not confined to a row of seats.
Don’t get me wrong, I was excited about the Concert Hall’s newly renovated interior, which cost AUD $150 million and was intended to accomodate bands exactly like Khruangbin. For many years the Concert Hall’s acoustics were considered subpar for musicians outside the traditional classical format, and its stage machinery was outdated, unable to handle bigger or more complex lighting and stage shows. I’ve seen several pop musicians and bands in the Concert Hall in the years I’ve lived in Sydney — including Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens (twice) and Underworld — and I always found the acoustics to be incredible. So if it was supposed to be even better than that, for a band with a sound as exquisitely balanced as Khruangbin’s, I wanted to experience it.
And to be clear, I think it’s good that more bands and pop artists are playing uptown as it were, and more fans are able to experience this magnificent venue.
As I arrived on Friday evening and took in the view of that impossible structure, the sails of its roof glowing pink in the late-springtime sunset — a sight that never fails to make my hair stand up, and which is no less dreamlike up close than it is in photos, and which always makes me think Ahhhhh this is why I moved here dammit, I forget sometimes! — I remembered a protest I attended there in 2018.
That year, the New South Wales state government had authorized advertising space on the Opera House roof for the barrier draw of a horse race, a cynical move clearly intended to benefit vile gambling companies. It aroused mass outrage in Australia for the way it tarnished everything special about the world-heritage building. On the first night, hundreds of protesters turned up to the Opera House to disrupt the ads with lasers and flashlights, chanting “Whose House? OUR House!” The state govenrment ended up suspending betting on the race. It was a great night.
I remember thinking how beautiful it was that so many ordinary people cared so much about the Opera House — the best proof that this place is not just for the upper crust. It’s the People’s House too. And the fact that it’s now more possible than ever to hear popular music there is a brilliant thing.
Despite my vague misgivings about the place as a venue for Khruangbin, these were my thoughts as I arrived…
…twenty minutes late. I realized as soon as I got there, with sudden, intense pangs of dismay as I heard their unmistakeable funk grooves emanating onto the concourse outside the Concert Hall, that I’d miscalculated, thinking they’d have an opener. Of course not! This is Sydney Opera House, there are no opening bands. I felt so uncultured.
As I said, I’ve seen a bunch of shows at SOH and I should have known better. But I just forgot — or maybe it was hard to imagine, for all the above-mentioned reasons, that a show by these freespirited funksters would be run the same as, like, a Sufjan Stevens gala performance.
It wasn’t just me; on Khruangbin’s social media the next day, they reminded fans not to be late to the next peformance at the Opera House, on the following Sunday night (a performance which was live-streamed and recorded — you can watch it here for a small fee). I think the same thing happened to a lot of people, and they must have gotten some complaints.
But as soon as I found my seat, I was instantly captivated by the trio, and very quickly forgot my frustration at being late. The next day, looking at setlists posted online, I gathered I missed two songs. Oh well. While settling in, I made a pact with myself: as long as I hadn’t missed “Time (You and I),” my favorite Khruangbin song and a recent addition to my favorite jams of all time, all would be forgiven. I lived in suspense about that for an hour or so but I was not disappointed. As soon as I heard it start, during the encore, I felt an extra-fierce feeling of delight, and it left me as satisfied as if I’d been on time.
I have to say, though, that I was partly right about the Concert Hall as a room in which to take in Khruangbin. It was awkward, the whole thing with waiting until enough people get up out of their seats and dance before you feel comfortable getting up yourself (especially being as tall as I am). And then having to dance in place, conscious of the people next to you, knocking your shins against the seat in front of you.
And the acoustics were actually slightly disappointing! The high end, especially the feedback from Mark Speer’s guitar, hurt my ears a bit. I’m not sure if Khruangbin were pushing the system too hard or if it was a house issue; but whatever the cause, from where I was in the stalls fairly close to the stage, I found myself wishing I was further back.
It wasn’t enough to spoil the night, but I just thought, if the acoustics are problematic, and dancing is awkward, why are we not at the Enmore??
There’s one more negative to jot down before I move on to covering the show itself: the almost total lack of mask-wearing among the crowd. If you’ve read my reviews of other recent gigs in Sydney, including Courtney Barnett and Tame Impala, you know how much this dismays me. The pandemic is not over — far from it, we’re in the middle of a fourth wave. New variants are appearing all the time. Covid has killed 13,000 Australians in 2022 alone, and counting. It shortens lives, causes permanent disability, dangerously overloads healthcare systems. Masks are proven to be tremendously beneficial in preventing it. What is so hard to understand about all this? If you look at the photos from Khruangbin’s shows in Japan and South Korea last month, you will see almost universal mask-wearing, and it looks like they all had a brilliant time — dancing with hands in the air and everything. Japanese and Korean people clearly understand what to do, why don’t most Australians?
Khraungbin is the sound of pure joy. Their music is so mellow and accessible you can play it for your mother-in-law on a Sunday morning, and yet it’s so inspired and adventurous and such an intricate mash of influences that no other band in the world can compare. It’s both simple and refined: there are only the three players, guitar, bass and drums; and they largely play instrumentals (they do sing, but their vocals tend to be ephemeral refrains that flow with the groove, not typical songs with verses and choruses that tell stories). Because of that stripped-down triangular dynamic, their music has a mesmerizing effect; you can focus on Donald “DJ” Johnson’s smooth, languid drumming for a while, then on Laura Lee Ochoa’s liquid, intensely melodic basslines for another while; then Speer’s swirling, soulful, psychedelic guitar parts take you over.
Both times I saw Sufjan Stevens at the Opera House, in 2010 and again in 2016, during his stage banter he excitedly referred to the pleasure and honor of playing in this spaceship, as he called it. Khruangbin’s set recalled those words to my mind. Their music is spacey — both in the sense of being spacious, and also being psychedelic, high-flying, free of constraints. They very often use space motifs on their brilliant tour posters — and sure enough, on the poster for the Sydney shows, the three members of the band are depicted as astral voyagers wearing the sails of the Opera House as spacesuits. So, despite my mixed feelings, this spaceship really was in some ways a perfect place for them to let loose with their space-funk.
The acoustics may have been less than perfect but they still had their magic, especially on the low end: Laura Lee’s basslines were so perfectly balanced in the mix, so prominent, so present, they felt like they were going right through me.
I could hear every tap and every shuffle of DJ’s drums. And I’ve never seen a drummer create such a chunky rhythm with so little visible effort. He’s so locked into a groove, and despite the lack of exertion compared to other drummers, such a pleasure to watch — there’s something soothing about it. A friend who’s a pro musician explained that the soft drum hits allow for compression to be applied so that the volume can be turned up. The end result is a big sound very much like programmed hip-hop beats despite its live nature.
That electronic element is a key to understanding Khruangbin. On the surface they have a very classic 70s feel. During Friday’s set they played a cover of “Summer Madness,” Kool & the Gang’s 1974 instrumental funk classic, and it could not have been more appropriate. You might be able to convince someone who’d never heard them that Khruangbin’s music hailed from the same era. And all three of them are such amazing players, with such spare arrangements and such tight interplay with each other, it all seems so organic.
But that classic feel is a bit deceptive: their sound is actually very modern and influenced by electronic music, if not actually electronic to some degree. This contradiction is what makes their music really gel; if they were just aping classic funk records it would be boring. But they owe an obvious debt to hip hop, and to dub and electronica and house and all manner of machine sounds. And their set has the feel of a DJ set, with few interruptions between songs and the groove just rolling.
This is especially the case with their famous covers medley, which they’ve been doing for years and which changes from one show to the next. Here, they started the medley with “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, which was a boss move in front of an Australian audience. Aussie music fans aren’t too cool to show love for their own icons and clearly the band knew that going in. To reinforce the point, later in the medley they played “Need You Tonight” as well as AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”
For the most part the medley was heavy on 90s hip hop — Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Kelis’s “Baby I Got Your Money,” Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day.” This is a brilliant tactic; these jams are universally beloved among Khruangbin’s target audience of twenty- and thirtysomething party people (well, fiftysomething in my case). Like the enormous twin disco balls that descended from the rafters in the middle of the set to the delight of all, the hip-hop covers have the instant effect of elevating the party vibe — which is only enhanced by the odd pop or rock song like Spandeau Ballet’s “True” or Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.”
What I wasn’t expecting was how the covers bled out into the rest of the show. Even after the medley proper was done, the covers kept popping up in the set. They interrupted “People Everywhere” during the encore to interpolate a bit of “What Is Love” by Haddaway. And the crowd ate it up, singing along with every word. To make such a cheesy dance-pop anthem part of their repertoire is as fearless as it is hellaciously fun.
It says a lot about Khruangbin that even though they’re such amazing songwriters and are making some of the most original music out there, their biggest motivation is to move people and make them happy, and if that means Dr. Dre and Spandeau Ballet covers then so be it. “The World’s Greatest Party Band” is a title long applied to the B-52’s, but since they are retiring this year perhaps we should all agree for the mantle to be passed on to Khruangbin.
This populism was manifested in their crowd interactions. At one point, Speer climbed down from the stage into the stalls and walked up the staircase near where I was sitting, vibing with the crowd and playing a solo the whole way.
Despite the egalitarian nature of the band’s sound (epitomized by their tight, beautiful three-part harmonies on most vocal numbers), and despite Speer’s and DJ’s brilliance, there’s no question Leezy is the star. She’s a true rockstar, albeit an unorthodox one, with her easy charisma, her fabulous disco fashions (she changed outfits before the encore, from a black sparkly pantsuit to a white sparkly one), and her languid, sinuous dance moves while working her bass. At the end, when the band introduced each other, she received the biggest cheers from the crowd by far.
Speaking of fashion: I honestly think the wigs are weird! But people love them and by now it’s hard to imagine Khruangbin without them, so who am I to say.
The encore of “Time (You and I)” was brilliant, the Roy Ayers-ish disco-funk jam with the joyous lyrics about living with the innocence of a child erupting into an extended psych-rock jam. Speer’s guitar playing usually involves tailing Leezy’s bass with infectious licks and fills — a highly rhythmic style of lead guitar, which entirely suits Khruanbin’s groove-oriented style. It’s not incredibly showy despite Speer’s evident skill, yet so melodic and infectious I sometimes find myself listening to one of their albums twice in a row. During this long interlude on “Time (You and I),” Speer set aside all that and became the cosmic guitar-shredding god we all know he can be and it was awesome.
“We’re Khruangbin, from Houston, Texas.” Those closing words from Speer in his Texas drawl (and which, as a friend reminded me, may be a deliberate tribute to Houston soul forebears Archie Bell & the Drells’ 1968 classic “Tighten Up”) were emblematic of everything I love about this band. They are multicultural in every sense — a Black man, and white man and a Latina coming together to play this amazing stew of funk, soul, psych-rock, hip hop, country, dub, disco, electronica, Latin, and global groove, so effortlessly you can’t even tell the difference between these styles anymore and it’s like a holistic vision of the last 80s years of popular music. They hail from a “red state” — but they defy every stereotype of the region, from their cosmic-groovy vibe to their Thai name. They are so global in outlook — and yet so very Texan at the same time, from their takes on long-haired country and Texas soul (especially in their collaborations with fellow Texan Leon Bridges) to the poncho and cowboy hat that DJ rocked on Friday night. They truly are special.
At the very end of the show, after the encore and while leaving the stage, Speer played a few licks of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” This was great on multiple levels — another smile-inducing cover, another bit of Australiana, and cheekily tantalizing us with the possibility of more from the band. But there would be no more on this night, and so maybe the “it” that isn’t over is Khruangbin’s mission to bring cosmic good times to people everywhere.
Feature image photo credit: Jordan K. Munns
Under the Paving Stones 