A LA SALA

The Texas-based trio of bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald ‘DJ’ Johnson Jr and guitarist Marko Speer may be best known to Songlines readers for their 2022 collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré on which they covered eight tracks by Ali Farka Touré. A LA SALA returns to the style of their non-collaborative albums, with reverb-heavy guitar dancing around dubby bass patterns as global polyglot tendencies mingle with classic soul, rock and psych tropes. ‘Pon Pón’ has a vaguely West African dancefloor flavour, like Mali’s Rail Band dosed with acid. ‘Farolim de Felgueiras’ and ‘Caja de la Sala’ are ambient, beatless instrumentals that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere. ‘Hold Me Up (Thank You)’ is funkier, ‘Juegos y Nubes’ has a mellow groove with a south-of-the-border mood à la Calexico and ‘Three from Two’ and ‘May Ninth’ twist traditional US roots into new shapes. Speer’s guitar dominates with a tone somewhere between Hank Marvin and Marc Ribot with a touch of Baobab’s Barthélémy Attisso – and if it’s not really a world music record in any recognised sense of the term, it is nevertheless full of unusual and unexpected sonic rewards.