Khun Narin’s Lollipop Shoppe Show Was Well Worth the Wait

With their orange vests and unpretentious demeanor, the five members of Khun Narin looked more like a wayward road crew than their actual vocation: an incandescent live band that fuses traditional Thai and Laotian melodies and instrumentation with the hypnotic pull of Afrobeat and psychedelic rock.

The group’s appearance in Portland this past Friday at Lollipop Shoppe was a long time coming. They were booked to play their first North American gig at Pickathon in 2017, but were forced to cancel that and a rescheduled show with the 1939 Ensemble. Little wonder then the humble club on Southeast Grand was packed with a sweaty crush of bodies all lost in the swirl of the quintet’s immersive sound.

The multigenerational ensemble, led by its namesake who stood at the front keeping tempo on a pair of hand cymbals, played for 90 minutes with only the briefest of pauses. The songs swirled for 15 minutes at a clip, with the band shifting on a dime from Afrobeat-like rhythms to something close to disco to heady rock.

Bearing the melodic weight was the young man playing an electrified phin, the three-stringed instrument with an elaborate headstock native to Khun Narin’s homeland. He cut through each song like a loose power line, snapping and sparking at the air as he tied together the reedy tones of traditional Thai music and the Western pop canon (at one point, he tossed out the refrain from Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”). And he pulled the occasional guitar god move, hoisting the neck of his instrument forth like a broadsword and looking into the audience with pride after a flashy fretboard run. But just as quickly, he would rein in those moments of vanity and fall right back into the collective whirl with the rest of us.