by Steph Cosme
LA LOM’s Live At Thalia Hall is a document of a sold-out March 2024 Chicago concert captured on tape and later issued worldwide on Verve. The album is an archival snapshot of a trio translating LA party-floor kinetics into theater acoustics without losing their dancer’s heartbeat. The official digital release lands on Verve Records (11 tracks, 40 minutes), situating the set squarely in the band’s ongoing dialogue between cumbia, bolero, Peruvian chicha, and West-Coast twang.
The Thalia Hall show wasn’t a routine tour date; it marked a transition for the trio from small LA rooms and dance parties to big theaters in under a year. They performed on a bright red, round stage placed in the center of the hall, surrounded on all sides by a roaring crowd. The concert was recorded on tape, capturing that staging decision in the stereo field and the album’s kinetic pacing. The audience’s energy functions as a fourth instrument.
If their studio debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, mapped the band’s LA-rooted hybridity with an archivist’s care, Live At Thalia Hall tests those designs in real time. The set list balances LA LOM originals with staples from Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, plus a Smokey Robinson slow jam reimagined for dancers. The set places classic cumbia cells alongside contemporary, guitar-forward presentation. Verve’s track list confirms a program that moves from “Alacrán” and “Figueroa” through the three-song cumbia medley (“El Paso Del Gigante / La Danza De Los Mirlos / Cumbia Sampuesana”), “Lucia,” “Angel’s Point,” “San Fernando Rose,” “Juana La Cubana,” “Llorar,” “Ooo Baby,” and “Cascabel.”
The performances are about rhythm and groove. LA LOM’s time feel is coming from a cumbia pulse center. With many patterns being grounded in a two-bar cycle. Jake Faulkner’s bass outlining downbeats with subtle anticipations; Zac Sokolow’s guitar supplying straight-eighth ostinati that flirt with off-beat syncopation; and Nicholas Baker’s snare/rim patterns articulating tresillo-adjacent stress without over-swinging. When the trio slides into bolero sway, the tempo sits a touch below medium, and you’ll notice a conspicuous rubato at phrase ends that Baker cushions with feathered cymbal decay, tiny micro-breaths that keep the hall breathing with them. The danzón-adjacent cadences appear as cadential side-steps with brief tonicizations that brighten the palette before snapping back to cumbia’s earth.
“Alacrán” has a looped guitar cell above a bassline that toggles with chromatic approach tones. Sokolow can certainly be cited as one who knows how to build a clear motivic development that is harmonically simple and rhythmically sticky. The noisy crowd encourages him further. As the audience roar swells, Baker moves from rim-click to drier snare strokes, narrowing the transient to drive momentum without flooding the mics; the effect is a forward-lean that never rushes.
The three-song medley of “El Paso Del Gigante / La Danza De Los Mirlos / Cumbia Sampuesana” is the evening’s example of the trio’s architecture of world sounds. Each tune contributes a distinct cell with “El Paso”’s stepwise bass ostinato, “Mirlos”’s hypnotic minor-pentatonic guitar riff, and “Sampuesana”’s call-and-response cadence. The transitions function as pivot modulations—modal centers slip by common-tone connection in the guitar while the bass keeps dancers oriented with a two-note pedal. Listen for the crowd’s pitch as the band locks the pivot; that surge isn’t just volume—it’s entrainment. The trio thins textures at transitions (single-note guitar + rim + root pedal), then rebuilds in layers to restore full density by the second A.
“Lucia” offers an elegant inner-voice adventure in the form of a jam. The bass outlines a minor modal exchange between the guitar harmonies and melody. The drums parallel the interaction that periodically diverge by contrary motion. These mini counterpoint moments wink at bolero without stating it outright. In the bridge, Baker’s cymbal playing introduces a new topic. The trio’s sound, recorded on tape, has that bloom that sounds three-dimensional in this hall. The live performance underscores the energy of the fully surrounding crowd.
Then there’s “Ooo Baby,” their Smokey Robinson moment. Rather than chase the original’s vocal velvet, LA LOM compresses the harmony into a slow-dance cumbia ballad. The trio keeps the progression of the melody while having a conversation between drums, bass, and guitar. The bass keeps the shuffle feel alive, encouraging sway. Baker favors rim shots and steady hi-hat to pull the audience in before opening the cymbals again. The trio is successful in translating a soul ballad into their language while preserving the titular sigh of the melody.
Production and capture choices are admirably transparent. The stereo image seats guitar just off-center with enough room air to keep transients natural; bass is centered, slightly forward in the mid-bass so patterning reads on small speakers; percussion sits high in the image with crisp front-edge transients and a controlled tail. Headroom is judicious—you’ll hear crowd peaks on shouts and call-backs, but the main trio stays within a comfortable dynamic ceiling, suggesting careful gain staging at the preamps and conservative bus compression in the mix. That aligns with the credit line pointing to live-to-tape recording, Jacob Butler’s mix work, and Dave Cooley’s mastering—an engineer trio that privileges dynamics and feel over surgical isolation.
Live At Thalia Hall is a delightful small-ensemble world dance trio. Latin-jazz rhythms, rock influences, and soulful dance minimalism combines with room energy of a live audience. The result is a persuasive argument that groove, not gloss, is the true high-fidelity for interactive music. Live At Thalia Hall captures a scene, a room, and a trio in full stride. That’s the short of it!
