Gunnersbury Park, deep in the bowels of west London near the M4, has enjoyed a musical month. Since the start of August, Supergrass, Smashing Pumpkins and The Libertines have played to tens of thousands of concertgoers in the park’s southwestern corner.
Headlining last Friday, however, was a far more current band. Khruangbin (meaning ‘airplane’ in Thai), a trio hailing from Houston, Texas, have been steadily climbing up the indie airwaves for 12 years and are just now entering the mainstream. Since I saw them in London last year at the Hammersmith Apollo, the band has gone platinum — thanks largely to inclusion in the soundtrack to the White Lotus’ third season. This show in Gunnersbury Park is advertised as the biggest they’ve ever done in the UK.
A Khruangbin concert is always a pleasantly relaxed affair. There are no forced greetings from any of the members; no attempts to rev up the crowd any more than they naturally are. This is nice: it shows a group that trusts its audience to have a good time.
And Friday’s was a gloriously produced affair: a simple stage set belying trippy, psychedelic visuals on screen. The band, as ever, did a brilliant job of segueing from a bop to a slow track whenever the crowd least expected it, playing with the tempo and atmosphere like pros.
They are so comfortable on stage — such chillers — that you wonder if they have ever had a bad day. Few players master their instrument or move in step with it as symbiotically as Khruangbin’s front-woman, Laura Lee, who reportedly hasn’t changed the strings on her bass guitar since 2012. Similarly unchanged was the style of lead guitarist Mark Speer, who appeared stuck in 2015: skinny black jeans and sporting a wig with a fringe to rival Claudia Winkleman’s.
Khruangbin kept all their classics for the finale, building things up slowly at the start before weaving in funkier tracks, standout solos and improvising new riffs for songs like Mr. White, White Gloves and Juegos y Nubes. Standout moments included a pulsating rendition of Evan Finds The Third Room (from their 2018 album Con Todo El Mundo) along with their greatest ballad, May Ninth, which saw the entire crowd sway as if it was a slow dance at a wedding or school disco. Time (You and I), one of the catchiest songs ever written about how love makes you feel like a child again, was also a triumph.
If those are all the marks of a technically excellent concert, the mark of a great concert — like that of a great novel or film — is pacing. Considering how big they’ve become, Khruangbin seem to suffer from small-band syndrome. It’s as if they are still playing to an audience of absolute connoisseurs, the kind of die-hard fans that Charli xcx would have played to in a 300-person venue circa 2019.
The reality, unwelcome though it is, is that many of the people at Gunnersbury Park are not particularly interested in watching Khruangbin play their back catalogue for an hour before finally doing the hits. It seems odd, too, that they should leave their biggest song, Texas Sun, out of the lineup.
Perhaps it’s deliberate: all part of the act. “We’re Khruangbin from Houston, Texas,” Speer says at the end of each concert, acting as if the band has just opened for someone much bigger and their manager is still handing out flyers to would-be listeners. But with success comes responsibility — to new fans as well as older loyalists. It might be worth it, next time, to open with Maria También.
