Khruangbin – Con Todo El Mundo

After Khruangbin’s initial breakthrough success with The Universe smiles Upon You in 2015, they released Con Todo El Mundo 3 years later. For all those fans of the first, their second LP continues to elaborate their typical style and grooviness. That being said, there are subtle changes: Listening closely to the first track Como me Quieres, you might discover that on top of Khruangbin’s trademark sound there is an atmosphere of an offbeat country - I picture a scenery of a dry, secluded prairie. This is recurrent in the entire album and what I want to highlight about  Con Todo El Mundo: Khruangbin have extended their musical aesthetics even more by resorting to additional sounds drawing from Caribbean, Indian and Middle Eastern music. This bears best with Maria Tambien masterfully combining funk with Iranian Sound.

Evan Finds the Third Room is similarly sounding funky. It is also a good example of Khruangbin’s technique to let each contributor of the melody to appear fairly equal, thus at no point do the instruments or the vocal line outdo each other. The result is a sound like a conversation between the instruments, supported by the vocal line which dispenses its normal leading position but inserts itself to the other instruments.

Con Todo El Mundo is a carefully crafted mix of a wide range of musical influences. Notwithstanding the many genres and cultures they combine, the end result is a smooth and pleasant sound. Khruangbin show to be extremely imaginative providing soothing and extremely chilled funky/psychedelic rock with the aim to create music that is open-minded to other cultures sharing these wonderful off beat sounds from a lot of places in the world with us.