Album Review: The Last Balloon by Tank and the Bangas
The last installment in the Balloon trilogy puts the writer in front of the singer.
A choir stacks the opening of “Rest” in a hymnlike harmony and sings “I will give you rest, Take my yoke upon you and learn of me,” and the room the singers build was modeled on a small Baptist church on a Sunday afternoon, not anywhere a 2026 R&B record was supposed to begin. Tarriona “Tank” Ball answers them across an electric piano figure Norman Spence had been turning over for months. She claims what she was told she deserves. The opener on her third Balloon LP enters through liturgy. That order also held on ThinkTank, the self-released debut from 2013, and on the spoken-word LP The Heart, The Mind, The Soul she put out almost three years ago, the album the Recording Academy honored in a category nobody had previously thought to give her. Church first. Then funk.
Green Balloon came out in 2019 through Verve Forecast and had Ball working too hard. She rode every chorus from above the arrangement, often louder than what the song was calling for, and she paid for it with a Best New Artist nomination she did not entirely want. Red Balloon, in 2022, brought the temperature down. Now, on “Don’t Count Yourself Out,” she hands the title chorus to Dawn Richard and answers only between Richard’s lines, the way a host steps off a stage so the guest can find her light. The kick thumps at mid-tempo. The trade sits. Ledisi gets her own verse on “Whole World” over organ and full horns before Ball comes back swinging: “Okay, bad day, that’s just one in a million, I’ve had twenty billion, I’m done people pleasin’.” It is the most generous singing she has ever recorded. She is not chasing the room anymore.
A piano motif and a kick that lands once per bar are the only objects in the mix on “Is It Over?”, an Austin Brown production credit on which nothing competes with her voice. The song poses the question her 2021 poetry collection Vulnerable AF posed: whether the next storm will take her. Her phrasing slips from whisper to chest-voice high notes across one verse, a volume range most pop mixers would compress in five minutes, and the piano comp holds two chords longer than commercial taste should allow. “Now the wall is caving, but I do not need your saving” is the line that prompts everything else, and she sings it deadpan, steady, decided. It is the best vocal she has ever cut. On “Move,” the classic-soul piece that picks up what the quiet track refuses, Lucky Daye sings “I’ma water your power flower, Give me a chance for thunder showers” over Darhyl Camper and Rob Debose’s walking bassline and bright horns, and Ball plays the requester (“Tired of flying, wings don’t take me high enough”). The funk track wants a partner. The quiet track wants nothing from anyone. Both succeed. Only one is dangerous. HaSizzle’s bounce production on “Go Your Own Way” hits the same hesitation with handclaps and a Calliope shuffle behind the brass, the song asking “What is it that’s holding you back?” It works, but it is not what the LP will be remembered for.
Josh Green and Austin Brown’s co-production on “No Invite” puts a stuttering bass that elbows the downbeat off the one underneath stacked snare hits and saxophone bleats that will not quiet. The kit shoves the horns. Brass arrives at the song’s second break already at her volume, and she half-shouts “I might start a riot, get that motherfucker started” while the section pushes from below. She had to refuse the line on every earlier vocal to make it land here. “Jealous” then hands the lead to Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, the founding Banga who left in 2022 to front Galactic and is back here for the first time as a guest: she thrusts “Welcome to my planet, Think I move like Janet” over a syncopated funk pocket Spence built with Brown and Tommy Parker. It plays as a peace offering. On “Nighttime,” a slower piece Brown and Brian London hand to David Shaw, Ball drives off with a leather jacket on, the lyric “Most of me stirred up like some Kool-Aid, but I’m drinking Alize” sitting over a Kindred the Family Soul sample. The Quarter is wet. She is alone. A decade past ThinkTank, she has nothing left to prove and is in no hurry to stop.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Is It Over?,” “No Invite,” “Nighttime”