CATALOG: DOC214
RELEASE DATE: 2/7/2020
Driving anywhere in Texas can cost you half a day, easy. For example, it’ll take you over four hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston, where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re in. Most of it can only be traversed by car (or truck, if you’re that kind of Texan). And it’s all baking under the Texas Sun that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new collaborative EP.
“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really comforting about that.”
On Texas Sun, these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future—a dreamy badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. Discovering it is like turning down a nameless country road and stumbling upon a hole-in-the-wall honky-tonk, where the jukebox has both Charley Pride and DJ Screw. It was unknown territory for Khruangbin, too: The band’s first time writing with a singer found them tailoring their exotic funk to Bridges’ soulful melodies. The result makes it clear it was a side-trip worth taking.
Over a slowly rolling backbeat and strums of flamenco-style guitar on lead single “Texas Sun,” Bridges sings of the pull this unique landscape can have on you, even from miles away, his yearning to feel its warmth again answered by ghostly cries of pedal steel. It’s a stunner of an opener, kicking off the EP’s own journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations, the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, Texas Sun is guaranteed to get you where you’re going—especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.