Khruangbin
The Universe Smiles Upon You ii
DEAD OCEANS
Remaining notoriously difficult to categorize throughout their career has worked wonders for Khruangbin. The trio can slither between genres, timeframes, volume levels, and entire universes—real and imagined—with ease, even convincing the GRAMMY committee to nominate them for a Best New Artist prize earlier this year, 15 years after the band’s start. That likely stems from the fact that with each left-of-center album, EP, collaboration, and live recording, Khurangbin reinvents themselves anew, with only their own oddness and amorphous psychedelic edge as their tenure-lasting signature. Dropping a surprise record seemingly designed as a follow-up to their 2015 full-length debut The Universe Smiles Upon You is only a shock if you weren’t paying attention in the first place.
Somewhat akin to this initial release, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii plays host to an enveloping, surround-sound fluidity, the sort of liquid-dream-inducing spaciness you’d find on Saturn’s largest moon, but with a deeply dug-in pulse. Utilizing the same track list as its 2015 iteration (including their vintage “Bin Bin” bonus track) and recorded on the day of those sessions’ 10th anniversary, Khurangbin doesn’t sound as if they’re reliving any past glories within the cavernous walls of ii. Instead, the trio have stopped at the cathedral’s gates, ruminating—playfully, gravely, lightly, darkly, and supremely quietly—on what’s gone on in-between those two points before detonating everything in sight.
I mention the quietude of ii, as volume control is the most impressive element of nuance brought into this supremely low-fidelity second volume. For an ensemble that’s forever made shade and subtlety their calling card, any advance is worth a mention. That means guitarist Mark Speer tucking into “Little Joe and Mary ii” with a brand of intriguingly foreign acoustic instrumentation that turns the album’s first track into a Sicilian folk song. The serpentine solo guitar that winds through the warm grooves of “Balls and Pins ii” is reminiscent of what would happen if Sade sang her way through Jeck Beck’s fusion-jazzy Blow by Blow, a resonant brand of frilly Philly soul whose dreaminess is quickly reborn as a breezy highlight of “White Gloves ii,” then made into the jaunty, flickering funk-lite of “People Everywhere ii.”
Touched by a barely there heavenly vocal choir in its background and Speer’s most poignant guitar lines, the organ-haunted closer “Zionsville ii” could pass for your high school prom’s final dance—an anthemically soulful “Always and Forever” for a new generation. I don’t know what Khurangbin’s reasons for remodeling The Universe Smiles Upon You were, and wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t understand it all, either. That’s what’s so gorgeous and bold about the surprise of ii: We’re all along for the same warm, smart ride.
