Los Parras

Corridos used to be something your uncles put on and you left the room for. Then a generation picked up the form, kept the storytelling and the requinto and threw out the deference, and suddenly it was the music your cousins fight over aux for. Los Parras sit inside that shift - young, from the tradition rather than borrowing it, writing the kind of narrative songs that work because the details are specific. What a theater show gives you that a festival set cannot is the quiet parts: this music has passages that are just two guitars and a voice, and in a seated two-thousand-capacity room you can actually hear them. The crowd will be multigenerational in a way almost nothing else in Los Angeles is, which is most of the point. They came up through the Sinaloa-to-California pipeline that produced most of this wave, and their catalogue is still short enough that the set is almost entirely songs people chose rather than songs a label pushed. The date is Friday the 2nd of October and the downbeat is at eight.