Tank and the Bangas Debut their "Red Balloon" at Jazz Fest

Tank and the Bangas, by Jeremy Tauriac

The new album leaves the confines of Orleans Parish to join larger musical conversations.

New Orleans music can often feel like it lives in its own world, but not Tank and the Bangas’ new Red Balloon. A few decades’ worth of pop culture—primarily Black pop culture—help the band map out how they live in a world where external and internal contexts put thoughts and actions in conflicting lights. 

That’s a lot, but Red Balloon succeeds because that brief plays to Tank and the Bangas’ strengths. They specialize in an information-dense presentation, and Tarriona “Tank” Ball put the “play” in “wordplay.” She externalizes her inner voices, so a thought rarely moves in one direction without another voice questioning it before another riffs and puns on the whole situation. Similarly, the band can sound like it learned everything it needed to know from Songs in the Key of Life, but it also has a Zappa/prog streak, minus the classical music nods, and hip-hop’s clearly part of their musical vocabulary as well. All the musical and personal material brought to the table gets a fair hearing on Red Balloon. 

The album’s conceit is that it’s a radio broadcast with three DJs—Wayne Brady, Questlove, and DJ Soul Sister—who introduce sonically related suites of material. That concept smartly addresses one of the byproducts of streaming, which is the tendency of listeners to forego listening to albums in favor of cherrypicking their favorite songs from artists they like to create their own playlists. The vinyl explosion says albums aren’t dead, but streaming math says that more people listen to songs than the albums they come from. 

So Tank and the Bangas made an actual album, one where the songs can be cut loose from the album but are better heard as part of the album as a whole. The slightly manic first section introduced by Brady—an inspired piece of stunt casting—presents life in 2022 as an overwhelming time where checking out and detaching feels like the only reasonable response. “The phone is the gateway to hell,” Tank sing/speaks, and in case it’s not clear what that means, a verse later she replaces that line with another way to say the same thing: “Desensitized is the new way.” That leads to “Anxiety” because that’s where COVID life has naturally led us, and Tank presents the choice of what to do about it by referencing Morpheus in The Matrix.  

In the last song in the first suite, “Communion in My Cup,” Tank twists a Lizzo line to sing, “I’m fucking up / that’s the human in me,” just deliberately as her echoes of Beyoncé in “Who’s in Charge?” Allusions like those add resonance to the songs by locating the band’s material in a musical world we know and marking Tank as someone who, like the rest of us, can’t help but reference her favorite songs and shows when she opens her mouth. Her pop culture is part of her language, and over the course of Red Balloon Ball mentions Hanging with Mr. Cooper, The Simpsons, Hammer Time, The Jeffersons, Marvin Gaye, and more, and you can hear a similar network of shout-outs in the music itself. “No ID” is a straight-up roller skating jam, and there are musical moments and instrument choices that bring songs and artists from the last 30-40 years to mind. A soaring, high, wordless moment recalls Minnie Ripperton, and the network of allusions creates the kind of musical density we get in hip-hop, where the song sampled gives us an additional piece of information to consider when processing the song. 

When the music reflects that level of ambition and scope, it’s no surprise that the songs themselves move from the of-the-moment neurotic outbursts to address a fuller, more emotionally complete life. “Café du Monde” wins the New Orleans-Songs-About-New Orleans derby by transforming the tourist Mecca into an oasis where a couple can watch the day slip away. “Black Folk” gives us Ball in her most overtly poetic mode as she lists a series of images that present an affectionate vision of Blackness when taken as a whole. The shifting of musical and lyrical gears makes Red Balloon sound contemporary and timeless at the same time, and the deeper emotions balance the twitchy, more hyperactive moments.

Green Balloon was as bold as Red Balloon, but it immersed listeners in the band’s aesthetic. That was its Job One: Introduce a national audience to Tank and the Bangas, and it presented them unfiltered and untranslated. Red Balloon doesn’t compromise either, but it has bigger goals. The album presents us with the image of the band trying to insert itself into larger Black musical conversations. It succeeds, but , but on the Bangas’ terms, of course. 

Tank and the Bangas play Jazz Fest on Saturday, April 30 at 3:50 p.m. on the Congo Square Stage. They’ll also play Tipitina’s on May 5, and Tarriona “Tank” Ball will be in conversation with Big Freedia and DJ Soul Sister on May 2 at 5:30 p.m. at the Toulouse Theatre.