Logjam Presents

Khruangbin

Men I Trust

KettleHouse Amphitheater

Missoula, MT
Add to Calendar 07/12/2022 20:00 07/13/2022 01:00 America/Boise Khruangbin

Logjam Presents is pleased to welcome Khruangbin for a live concert performance at the KettleHouse Amphitheater on Tuesday, July 12, 2022. Tickets go on sale Friday, February 4, 2022, at 10:00AM at the Top Hat, online or by phone at 1 (800) 514-3849. General Admission standing pit tickets and general admission seating/lawn tickets are available. Shuttle… Continue Reading

Logjam Presents - Missoula, Montana false MM/DD/YYYY
6:30PM (door) 8:00PM (show)
$35-$45 (Adv.) + applicable fees
All Ages
Sold Out Event Info Ticket Waiting List Shuttle / Parking

Logjam Presents is pleased to welcome Khruangbin for a live concert performance at the KettleHouse Amphitheater on Tuesday, July 12, 2022.

Tickets go on sale Friday, February 4, 2022, at 10:00AM at the Top Hat, online or by phone at 1 (800) 514-3849. General Admission standing pit tickets and general admission seating/lawn tickets are available. Shuttle and parking tickets for this event are also available for advance purchase here. All ages are welcome.

Available Ticket Types:

General Admission Pit: General admission pit tickets allow access to the standing room only section located directly in front of the stage.

General Admission Seating/Lawn: General Admission Seating/Lawn tickets allow general access to the stadium-style seating and upper lawn area of the amphitheater.

Additional ticketing information and policies can be found here.

All concerts are held rain or shine. Be prepared for extremes such as sunshine, heat, wind, or rain. All tickets are non-refundable. In the event of cancellation due to extreme weather, tickets will not be refunded.

About Khruangbin

Khruangbin has always been multilingual, weaving far-flung musical languages like East Asian surf-rock, Persian funk, and Jamaican dub into mellifluous harmony. But on its third album, it’s finally speaking out loud. Mordechai features vocals prominently on nearly every song, a first for the mostly instrumental band. It’s a shift that rewards the risk, reorienting Khruangbin’s transportive sound toward a new sense of emotional directness, without losing the spirit of nomadic wandering that’s always defined it. And it all started with them coming home.

By the summer of 2019, the Houston group—bassist Laura Lee, guitarist Mark Speer, drummer DJ Johnson—had been on tour for nearly three-and-a-half years, playing to audiences across North and South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia behind its acclaimed albums The Universe Smiles Upon You and Con Todo El Mundo. They returned to their farmhouse studio in Burton, Texas, ready to begin work on their third album. But they were also determined to slow down, to take their time, and luxuriate in building something together.

It’s a lesson Lee had recently learned with the help of a new friend, a near-stranger who had reached out when she was feeling particularly unmoored, inviting her to come hiking with his family. That day, as they’d all made their way toward the distant promise of a waterfall, Lee had felt a dawning clarity about the importance of appreciating the journey, rather than rushing headlong toward the next destination—something she’d almost lost sight of during the band’s whirlwind rise. When they reached the waterfall, at last, Lee’s friend urged her to jump, a leap she likens to a baptism. As she did, he screamed her name—her full name, the one she’d recently taken from her grandfather. In that instant, Laura Lee Ochoa was reborn. She emerged feeling liberated, grateful for what her friend had shown her. His name was Mordechai.

Ochoa’s rejuvenation found its expression in words—hundreds of pages’ worth, which she’d filled over a self-imposed day of silence. As Khruangbin began putting together the songs that would make up the next record, discovering in the spaces it seemed like only vocals could fill, they turned to those notebooks. Khruangbin had worked with lyrics before: the love-letter poetry of “Friday Morning,” the ghosts of conversations gone by in “Cómo Te Quiero.” But this time Ochoa had found she had something to say—and so did the songs. They needed each other. And letting those words ring out gave Khruangbin’s cavernous music a new thematic depth.

Chief among those themes is memory—holding onto it, letting it go, naming it before it disappears. Again and again, the songs play on those notions, from the sun-dappled disco of lead single “Time (You And I)”—which evinces the feeling of a festival winding down to its final blowout hours—to the lilting “So We Won’t Forget,” which finds Ochoa filling her apartment with memories she’s scrawled on Post-Its to prevent them slipping away. It’s there, too, in “Dearest Alfred,” which was inspired by a trove of letters Ochoa’s grandfather wrote to his twin brother, as well as “If There Is No Question,” a metaphysical devotional (by way of Marvin Gaye) that harkens back to Johnson and Speer’s earliest days in a church band. And those same nostalgic wisps curl all-around “Connaissais De Face,” a Middle Eastern vamp by way of Serge Gainsbourg that evokes all the ruminative romance of a French New Wave film, layered with its own tender dialogue of reminiscence.

Musically, the band’s ever-restless ear saw it pulling reference points from Pakistan, Korea, and West Africa, incorporating strains of Indian chanting boxes and Congolese syncopated guitar. But more than anything, the album became a celebration of Houston, the eclectic city that had nurtured them, and a cultural nexus where you can check out country and zydeco, trap rap, or avant-garde opera on any given night. The Roy Ayers funk of opener “First Class” created a lush bed for the band to stretch out on, singing wryly about popping champagne while jet-setting all over the world. But in the end, those brags are revealed to be a shoutout to the home that made all this possible, a love that’s evident in its hands-in-the-air refrain of “H-Town.”

In those years away from that home, Khruangbin’s members often felt like they were swimming underwater, unsure of where they were going, or why they were going there. But Mordechai leads them gently back to the surface, allowing them to take a breath, look around, and find themselves again. It is a snapshot taken along a larger journey—a moment all the more beautiful for its impermanence. And it’s a memory to revisit, again and again, speaking to us now more clearly than ever.

Men I Trust

Dreampop is leading us into the next century. It is one of the more progressive and ever-evolving sub-genres of the past decade. A relatively new genre that combines the ethereal and harmonic vocals from Shoegaze as well as the catchy and jangly melodies from pop. While the genre isn’t exactly narrowly defined this is one of more the common definitions I see across the music community. It is one of my favorite genres at the moment and the one I look out for the most when I’m exploring new music. The genre is ever-expanding and is one of the main sub-genre that is leading us into the new decade. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about one of my favorite bands of this decade and their evolution to where they are now.

The story of Men I Trust’s rise to indie fame is a bit more abnormal than most. The group initially started without their lead singer. In 2014 producer Dragos Chiriac and bassist Jessy Caron, both Quebec music graduates and high school friends reunited after college and came together to form a duo named Men I Trust. Their music was heavily inspired by the electronic movement of the 2000s. If you take for example a song from their self titled 2014 debut like Endless Strive and compare it to their most recent output you immediately hear the difference in their approach to production. The programmed robotic electronic drums alongside these boisterous synthesizers give you a closer look into how the duo looked at song creation. The basics where all there, the dance-inducing, funkiness and soothe demeanor coupled with great vocal performances by frequent guest collaborators offered a range of different song types. At that was really missing would soon be discovered.

In 2015 as they were working on their next project they came across a video on Facebook of their future lead singer Emmanuelle Proulx. They were so impressed by her voice they invited her on to their 2015 album Headroom. On the track Out In Myself, we get a very subdued and reverb packed poetic performance from Emma with some lyrics I still can’t even understand myself. What the hell is a “dread cabalist night”? I’m not too sure but it slaps regardless. The other track she lends her voice to Curious Fish is a little dancier and energetic with these stabbing and interjecting strings that pop in from time to time. And the tale of a lone fish being attracted to love and pulled it by its shiny exterior. The album itself is fantastic, with the first half being very feature heavy with every singer lending the best version of themselves and the bottom half taking bits and pieces from house music and 80’s style synthesizers reminiscent of the fairly new at the time Random Access Memories by French house duo Daft Punk. While I am a big fan of this record the band would later go on to say in many interviews that the sound of the album was almost too clear and pristine that it essentially dehumanized many of the aspects of the project and that they were naturally moving towards a more organic sound. This would ring especially true as the marathon of singles began.

So what happened next? They haven’t been very clear in their interviews but one can only assume that sometime in between June of that year and March of the next Emma was asked to join the band as their official and full-time singer. In early March of 2016, they released their first single as a full 3-piece band Humming Man. The song is magical, beginning with a very simple loop and drum kick while Emma speaks from the perspective of an anxious and paranoid old man who has disconnected himself from the outside world. “Amid the gate, he stares at my door. How long did I see him stay?” is one of the many lines that puts you in that old man’s shoes all while you bob your head alongside that groovy bass line. The vocals are brimming with reverb and tons of effects that give this song an out-of-body experience.