LA LOM, Live At Thalia Hall Review

by Stamish Malcuss

To a sold-out crowd on March 2024, the trio known as LA LOM captured their interaction with an enthusiastic crowd live to tape. Verve Records has released the digital version of the eleven songs, Live At Thalia Hall, that range from cumbia, bolero, Peruvian chicha, to West-Coast rock. LA LOM is composed of LA natives Zac Sokolow (guitar), Jake Faulkner (bass), and Nicholas Baker (drums/percussion).

The room itself does some storytelling. Thalia Hall was built in the 1890s and restored as a landmark venue in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. The sonics carries the signature of a Romanesque theater: wood, balcony reflections, a natural bloom that flatters hand percussion and guitar overtones while preserving bass definition when the engineer keeps the low end tight. You hear it in the reverb tail around the instruments and space. The room can also be heard in the way audience shouts wrap around the ensemble in the round.

Sokolow’s electric guitar wears two hats, a lead voice and timbral orchestrator. His shifting from clean, bell-like upper-register melodies to palm-muted motorik figures that stand in for guiro patterns is an example of this hat trick. Faulkner’s bass is the hinge: a thick, woody fundamental that carries cumbia’s heel-toe weight while periodically articulating chord-tone enclosures to imply cadential function.

Nicholas Baker’s drums/percussion ride the fulcrum between kit and hand-percussion language; you’ll hear dry, front-of-kit transients on rim and tom articulations complemented by the room’s early reflections, a balance that reads intimate on headphones and spacious on speakers. Credits confirm the live-to-tape ethos: recorded by Barrett Guzaldo and Michael Franz Novak, mixed by Jacob Butler, mastered by Dave Cooley, and produced by LA LOM.

Improvisation and chemistry are consistently functional in ways that are in service of groove. Solos are built on short-patterns, motivic, and timbre-aware. Sokolow tends to develop one cell per form, varying tones and articulation (distorted bite vs. rounded clean tones), while Faulkner’s fills are connective tissue with scalar pickups into downbeats, little chromatic clamps that telegraph cadences to dancers. Baker’s improvised commentary works in ways you can’t quite write down with its ghost-noted murmurs and rim tattoos that index where the body should be at the top of the next phrase. It’s a dance band’s version of interplay that is conversational enough to reward close listening and never so discursive that the floor loses the one.

Consider how LA LOM uses ostinato economy to free up orchestration within the guitar trio setting. One guitar cell plus a bass pedal gives the drummer space to converse without destabilizing the dance. Note the arranging trick of staging in the round as it changes crowd feedback loops and thus tempo micro-choices. Its these details that simulate the trio by surrounding them with a moving audience. The transitions are architecture of texture and building density.

Live At Thalia Hall is a reliable live performance blueprint that pays off. From a capture perspective, let the room do some work too. A close-but-not-clinical mic picture on kit and guitar, with the bass slightly forward, lets the hall’s early reflections read as vibe, not smear. Finally, train time feel at two tempos for each tune (dance-floor brisk and theater-bloom medium) and decide which one opens the room best; LA LOM’s choices suggest a bias toward tempos that keep hips moving while letting the hall breathe.