Freshly Spilt Milk: Hurray for New Riff Raff, Tank and Trombone Shorty

Hurray for the Riff Raff, by Akasha Rabut

New Orleans artists and ones who spent time here dominate this week’s new music playlist.

This experiment in making playlists from the PR mailings I find in my inbox pays off better some weeks than others. This week’s thick with New Orleans & New Orleans-adjacent artists including Hurray for the Riff Raff, Tank and the Bangas, Lucky Daye, Trombone Shorty, Luke Winslow-King, and Erika Lewis. I also get new David Holmes, who I really like, and great new music from Niger and Columbia on two labels with exploring—Sahel Sounds and Palenque Records. 

As always, I vouch for the song not the artist or album, but I feel like I’m in good musical hands with Alynda Segarra, Tank and the Bangas, Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, Etran de L’Air, Shorty and David Holmes. 

Freshly Spilt Milk will return in two weeks. It’s Mardi Gras here in New Orleans, and I won’t be spending this weekend or the start of next week working on this playlist.

1. “Wolves” - Hurray for the Riff Raff: From the new Life on Earth. Alynda Segarra’s tracks repeatedly let you know how hard this world is, but they also remind you how beautiful and necessary resistance is, regardless of its outcome.

2. “Black Folk” - Tank and the Bangas: On this track from their upcoming Red Balloon, they reconnect to Tarionna “Tank” Ball’s slam poetry background. Over a late night vibe, she describes blackness in some specifically New Orleans terms. 

3. “Sunny Day” - Seth Swirsky: I wish a little of the energy spent recreating ’60s psychedelic pop went into lyrics about more than just a sunny day, but how many of the songs it references were more meaningful?

4. “Year to Run” - Duquette Johnston: Johnston worked on the fringes of ‘90s alt-rock as a member of Verbena while they were still an indie act, then as part of Juliana Hatfield’s re-formed Blake Babies. His life went as that life might suggest—not well—but his new album, The Social Animals, shows why he got chances then and continues to get them now.

5. “Rockwell” - Chaz Cardigan: From the press release announcing the song: “‘Over the last few songs I’ve released I’ve been telling a story, and looking at my relationship with the United States as if it was my lover,’ shares Cardigan. ‘In “We Look So Good” and “Pictures,” I’m picking apart the relationship and saying, ‘wow, this looks really unhealthy. “Rockwell” is the fantasy of what the relationship could be. Total ecstasy in the white picket fence myth — traditional gender norms, power, and institutions that care about you. It’s a lie, but it’s fucking fun to believe in.” 

6. “6 Star Wanted Level” - BabyTron: Detroit’s BabyTron has a new album, Megatron, due out March 4, and I have no idea what he’s on about on this track, but it’s fun to listen to go.

7. “Father Father” - Khruangbin and Leon Bridges: Two Texas acts from Houston and Ft. Worth come together on the Texas Moon EP, and Khruangbin’s easy, droning groove makes Bridges sound contemporary—something I’d like to hear more often. I’m also there for prayers this personal and psychedelic.

8. “Terracotta Sunroom” - Pastel Blank: Victoria, British Columbia’s Pastel Blank sell themselves as experimental art-rockers, and if a Canadian Talking Heads with impressionistic lyrics a la Dan Bejar and Stephen Malkmus counts as experimental, then sure. 

9. “Duffle Bag” - Trilly: I like how conventionally musical this sounds, particularly on the chorus where Trilly’s attention to the melody matches the melancholy. His flow similarly feeds the film noir vibe, but he picks up on the desperate yearning more than the fatalism that mires many hip-hop forays into similar territory.

10. “Imouwizla” - Etran de L’Air: I’m a total mark for the North African guitar music often thought of as desert blues. This is a first track from their new album, Agadez, named for their hometown in northern Niger that is the center for this sound. 

11. “Door Four” - Victoria Reed: The breathy quality of her performance makes this mediation on dealing with defeat and disappointment personal and warm, even guardedly optimistic. The organ drone also gives the song a time-stands-still quality, as if Reed’s pausing a difficult moment to help you see through it to whatever will come next.  

12. “f**k it, i’m the man” - SEB: The push in the groove adds a gently triumphant note to SEB’s experience with self-definition that could easily have drifted into melodrama.

13. “I Keep” (feat. Tove Lo) - BROODS: The Australian duo cowrote this with a Swedish producer over a Zoom session, which is so 2022. From the upcoming Space Island. They’ll be in the U.S. for a tour starting May 20 at SXSW.

14. “Post Punk” - The Crystal Method, Hyper, and Iggy Pop: There’s only one guy in The Crystal Method now—don’t know if it’s Crystal or Method—and his techno-rock sounds of its day down to the seemingly found soundbite that gives the piece shape and dynamics. But the soundbite features Iggy Pop staking out his individual space, so I’m there for it.

15. “Hourglass (Spinning Around)” - Beshken: The circular structure perhaps explains the subtitle, but I can’t be sure since Ben Shirken’s sing-spoken baritone blends easily into the instrumentation, making his voice a sound rather than a vehicle to convey meaning. Normally, I’m suspicious of that, but here it like the musical trips around and around make me want to lean in, which is probably the point. 

16. “NWA” (feat. Lil Durk) - Lucky Daye: One my students at Loyola wrote about her affection for New Orleans’ Lucky Daye, who is nominated for Grammys for Best Traditional R&B Performance and Best Progressive R&B Album categories for his EP Table For Two (and only the Grammys can find the same recording to be traditional and progressive). He started a national tour for his upcoming Candydrip album on March 18, and it will bring him to the Joy Theater on April 1. 

17. “As Far Away as Possible” - Shout Out Louds: I heard this and flashed on The Church—not “Under the Milky Way” specifically, but close enough. Producer Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John fame keeps the Swedish band from sounding too retro.

18. “Love at First Sight” (feat. Charles Hodges) - Luke Winslow-King: New Orleans’ Winslow-King has a knack for getting what he needs to from his blues without sounding like’s imagining himself in a juke joint and an era far from his real experience. From the upcoming If Walls Could Talk.

19. “Come Back” - Trombone Shorty: Shorty kept a low profile during the pandemic, and will release his next album, Lifted, during Jazz Fest. “Come Back” sounds like a continuation of what he was doing on his previous albums, staking a claim to the pop/R&B/funk of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and he does it so well that you understand why. It would sure be nice to hear him make 21st century music with his peers and not their parents as the target audience.

20. “Los Guasangú” (Cerrero remix) - Semblanzas del Rio Guapi & Cerrero: One of my favorite Bandcamp discoveries has been the Palenque record label, which specializes in reggae and regional music from Columbia. I’ve found some good dancehall comps, but the real find has been the producer Cerrero and his dub tracks. Here he blurs all of Palenque’s musical worlds together into an often ambient track that still finds its way to some dramatic moments.

21. “Loser” - Erika Lewis: Tuba Skinny’s Erika Lewis tries her hand convincingly at Americana on this, the first release from her upcoming album produced by The Deslondes’ John James Tourville. It’s a genre exercise, just like Tuba Skinny’s take on traditional jazz, but I’ll take exercises this well executed.  

22. “Sun and Moon” - Panjoma: Austin’s Panjoma’s techno-influenced pop isn’t techno pop. “Sun and Moon” is too open-ended, and if it has a chorus, it’s so subtle it slipped by me. Still, the lyrics and robotic vocals keep the track from sounding like it could, like techno, go on forever. The lo-fi electronic sounds are a feature, not a bug, for me.

23. “It’s Over, If We Run Out of Love” - David Holmes: I love Holmes’ soundtracks for Steven Soderburgh films including Out of Sight and the Oceans Eleven trilogy. Nothing but the intelligence in those albums prepares you for this piece of psychedelic bit of dance rock underpinned by sequencers nicked from the back of New Order’s gear truck. 

24. “0.002” - The Pocket Gods: From the new album, 1000x30: Nobody Makes Money Anymore. On it, The Pocket Gods present 1,000 songs—seriously—each 30 seconds long because that’s the minimum length of time someone must listen to a song on Spotify for it to count as a stream. The song title comes from the amount a band gets paid for each stream. Another title from the album: “Nobody Makes Money Anymore.”