Freshly Spilt Milk: Fredo Bang, Seratones, Trombone Shorty , Tigra & Spncr and More

Seratones

This week’s inbox jukebox is all about dance music and psychedelic rock.

Freshly Spilt Milk is my inbox jukebox, pulling together the best of the promo announcements sent to me each week. When I started this, I assumed that the playlists would all be roughly the same, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how different they have been so far. Last week, I got a lot of good hip-hop, while this week features more house and techno than I have included in the past. Texture-intensive, melodic rock has a lot of currency in my inbox, and this week’s playlist could be a half-hour longer with other noteworthy songs with that sound that I let go. 

The artists I want to know more about this week: The Spy from Cairo, Royal Canoe, Fredo Bang, David Heatley, and TIGRA & SPNCR. Artists here that I can already vouch for: Kishi Bashi, Seratones, Lucky Daye, Nicholas Payton, and Trombone Shorty.   

1. “Rich Kids Ruin Everything” - Mod Sun: This delivers everything I want from pop-punk including a proper snotty attitude, and it helps that I believe the title sentiment. 

2. “You Caught Me Lyin’” - Mystic Seers: The sonic pastiche dresses up this Beatlesque pop song in a closetful of musical wardrobes, none of which on their own or together detract from the psychedelic feel.

3. Feel This Way” (Ghettoblaster remix) - Claptone & Mayer Hawthorne: Mayer Hawthorne provides the obligatory soul-inflected vocals for Claptone’s house original, remixed by ghetto house producer Ghettoblaster to bump up the clatter and throb.

4. “Federal Raid” - Fredo Bang: Baton Rouge’s Fredo Bang gives me a reason to care about the gangsta story by talking about what happens when it all goes wrong and you’re busted. He wants to know where everybody went and who he can trust, which is infinitely more interesting and identifiable than gunfights and payback.

5. “Cosmic Pasha” - The Spy from Cairo: I’ll 100 percent sign on for world dub. Moreno Visini steers hard into exotic textures and melodies, but without straying too far from the reassuring 4/4 thump. From the new album, Animamundi. 

6. “Problems of Your Past” - Mary Simich: Garage guy King Khan produced Simich’s new How Does One Begin, bracketing her country twang with a deeply echoed guitar behind her and an abrasive, scraped-sounding acoustic guitar in front. That scrape keeps her song from disappearing into an Angelo Badalementi-like black hole, which keeps the song grounded and immediate. It also give me a reason to interact with “Problems of Your Past” more as sound than sentiment, though.

7. “Worm” (feat. Dill the Giant) - Royal Canoe: Psychedelic pop from Winnipeg, because what else would you do in Winnipeg? I respect “Worm” because most psychedelic anything doesn’t go far enough for me. The “weirdness” is cosmetic, but Royal Canoe’s strangeness is organic with songs and sections that hang together, but the governing logic isn’t obvious. The refrain that starts, “We’ve got a second to kill,” is sung by a chorus of the downtrodden, which gives “Worm” emotional stakes, even if it’s hard to know why. From Vault (2011-2021), out now. 

8. “Manchester” (Demo-arigato Version) - Kishi Bashi: Kishi Bashi’s 151a put him on the map with the commercialcore “Bright Whites” 10 years ago. Since then, he has expanded his sonic palate and ability to create rich soundscapes by looping his violin, but part of the charm of that debut album was that he burst out of the gate with songs. A new anniversary edition of 151a includes demos of the tracks on the album and even stripped down, “Manchester” moves to a chorus that you don’t see coming and look forward to for the rest of the song. Here’s my interview with Kishi Bashi from 2013 while touring 151a. 

9. “Bug Bite” (feat. Lucy McWilliams) - Levi Evans: Levi Evans is the son of U2’s The Edge, not that anything on “But Bite” beyond an attention to sound and texture would tell you that this intimate, electronic R&B slow jam has a famous grandfather.

10. “Afro Acid” - Tribal House Crew: This is exactly what the song title and band name would lead you to expect. It’s rave o’clock somewhere.

11. “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles)” - Wednesday: I’m ambivalent about this one. On Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling Them Up, Asheville, NC’s Wednesday covers Drive-By Truckers, Vic Chesnutt, and Roger Miller among others. I love the squalls of noise that melt all over this cover of the great Gary Stewart, the bard of booze songs. I’m not sure the shifts to half-time help, but I include this because I love Gary Stewart and hope this will inspire you to check him out too.  

12. “Bay of Pigs” - Ex-poets: The woozy groove and Jordan Brooks’ line delivery make “Bay of Pigs” sound like he has been daydrinking until he finally got some game. From Dust, due out this fall. 

13. “Meme” - David Heatley: I want to reject this piss-off to social media from the new Life Our Own Way, recorded by Mark Bingham at Piety Street Recording in Henderson, Louisiana, but I can’t. “Meme” isn’t for posterity and a future generation that will have no idea what he’s singing about; it’s for the three minutes it takes to get this shit off his chest—something his delivery and chattering guitar makes clear. 

14. “Two of a Kind” - Seratones: Shreveport’s Seratones continue to grow, and each incarnation rewards attention. They’ve moved past their garage punk days and the R&B rock of Power. On this track from the upcoming Love & Algorythms due out April 29, the sound is more organic and less genrebound than ever before. Singer AJ Haynes is always compelling, and now the songs feel even more like a natural extension of who she is.

15. “F.E.A.R.” - Mild Orange: On this track from the New Zealand band’s recent Looking for Space, Mild Orange sings about “running to your greatest fear.” The title is the zen-lite acronym that makes the running possible: “Forget Everything and Relax.” 

16. “If They’re Shooting at You” - Belle and Sebastian: This one-off song is a benefit for Ukraine relief, with all artist revenues including digital and streaming royalties going to the Red Cross. According to the band, “It’s a song about being lost, broken and under threat of violence. The key line is ‘if they’re shooting at you kid you must be doing something right.’”

17. “God Body” (feat. Smino) - Lucky Daye: New Orleanian Lucky Daye will play the Joy Theater on April 1 in support of his new Candydrip album. What he considers nod to Afrofuturism just sound like R&B with parts brought into extreme relief, but I’ll 100 percent take it. 

18.  “Levin’s Lope” (feat. Ron Carter) - Nicholas Payton: New Orleans’ Nicholas Payton recently released Smoke Sessions and Smoke Sessions Remixed, the latter remixing what Payton calls Black American Music, which the casual listener would hear as jazz. The remix album and this track reinforce the idea of a genre defined by culture and not sound because Ron Carter’s bass remains the star of the show, but Karriem Riggins and Tomoki Sanders remake the track into something familiar, satisfying, and largely unprecedented.

19. “Head in the Clouds” - Max Frost: From Flying Machines, due out May 6. Multi-instrumentalist and producer Max Frost uses a sound that’s both watery and crystalline at the same time to give the song a psychedelic quaver while a stomp straight from Maxine Nightingale keeps the track from getting too loose.

20. “Can’t Walk Away” - TIGRA & SPNCR: TIGRA was Harlem-born and raised in Hollis, Queens near Run-DMC, and there’s a lot of first gen hip-hop in her vocal delivery. Certainly her rhymes. That, paired with the track’s pop/club calypso, give “Can’t Walk Away” a charming purity. It’s not staking out a direction or a concept; it’s simply an invitation to dance. 

21. “Everything” Hovvdy: Austin’s Hovvdy will play Gasa Gasa in support of True Love on Thursday, April 17. The band has some of the sincerity that seems to come with acoustic guitars, but the swelling soundscape shows they’re smart enough not to make sincerity their selling point. 

22. “Lifted” - Trombone Shorty: The title track from Trombone Shorty’s upcoming album is curious in that the horns sound largely ornamental, and the meat of the track is Pete Murano’s heavy guitar riff. It’s hard and plays into the “superfund rock” concept that Shorty has claimed for his music.