Weekly Music Roundup: Sanya N'Kanta, Bomba Estéreo, and Rostam

Week of Feb. 8: This week, a feel-good song from North Carolina-based Sanya N’Kanta, a cautionary song from Rostam (formerly of Vampire Weekend), and the return of Colombia's Bomba Estéreo, featuring Lido Pimienta. Plus, a new song from Madison Cunningham, and a benefit album for NIVA’s program Save Our Stages.

PREMIERE: Sanya N’Kanta May Just Have The Feel-Good Song Of The Week

Jamaican-born, North Carolina-based singer and guitarist Sanya N’Kanta has written songs that take a hard look at the state of the world – songs like “I.C.E. at the Door” and “The Hard Lesson” – but his new song “Waste My Time” is different.  Along with much of his new EP, These Are The Days, “Waste My Time” is about looking inward, at things like family and home, and looking upward, seeing a reason to be hopeful.  “I just wanna waste my time/with you,” he sings at the beginning, and again at the end, of the song; and while other songs of his have a thumping dance beat or a harder rock edge, that wouldn’t work here.  This track has a whiff of 70s pop-rock, with its soulful organ in the chorus; and N’Kanta’s falsetto recalls that of Mick Jagger in “Beast of Burden.”  In the video, N’Kanta tells us, “you get a chance to see the inspiration behind my song”: N’Kanta, his wife and two kids are on the beach at sunset, essentially living out the song’s first and last line, and reminding us, as N’Kanta puts it, that "these are the days that we will always remember."

Bomba Estereo Cast An Electro-Cumbia Spell On New Single

It’s been four years since the Colombian band Bomba Estereo released their last album, which spawned their biggest hit, “To My Love.” Now they’ve announced a new record, Deja, coming this spring, and they made the announcement while releasing a trio of singles. This one, released as a video as well, is “Agua,” and while it has the Bomba mix of electronica and traditional South American rhythms (most notably the cumbia), it may also reflect the band’s increasing interest in the sounds of nature and of Colombia’s indigenous people. (That was the inspiration for the Monte project released a few months back by the band’s founder Simon Mejia.) The video, directed in part by lead singer Li Saumet, finds her sharing vocal duties with Afro-Colombian (and now Canadian-based) singer Lido Pimienta. Meanwhile, some beautiful images of water and forests are the setting for a ritual of connection with nature, driven, Saumet says, by a surreal and feminine energy. 

Rostam Looks To The Planet’s Future With “These Kids We Knew”

“These Kids We Knew” is a song for our time: Rostam (that’s Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend) suggests that the cost of decades of damage to our environment will fall on the shoulders of future generations. It’s also a product of our time: he wrote it while recovering from COVID-19 last spring – “in a fever-dream state,” he writes. The song, for all its portent, has a gentle but insistent driving beat, and Rostam’s layered vocals seem to offer reassurance. The video, strangely listing multiple copyright dates of MCMXLIX (1949), shows animated images of a post-apocalyptic world where all is not lost. 

Madison Cunninham Debuts New Song On Morning Edition’s Song Project.

Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Madison Cunningham contributes this month’s entry to NPR/Morning Edition’s Song Project, which asks a musician to write and record a song reflecting life in the time of a pandemic. Cunningham’s song, “Broken Harvest,” is an acknowledgment of loss – and of the fact that we deal with loss all the time, and somehow still manage to go on. The arrangement seems to fit that idea: it is a steady, almost Minimalist-inflected interlocking of different instrumental parts, and Cunningham’s singing is warm and comforting, in the same way that George Harrison’s was on “All Things Must Pass,” which may be a kind of spiritual godfather to this song. 

New Benefit LP Helps Struggling Independent Music Venues

Me & My Guitar is a collection of simple songs – just singers and their acoustic guitars – for a complex project. NIVA, the National Independent Venue Association, formed last Fall as nightclubs and concert halls found themselves in increasingly desperate straits. NIVA’s program Save Our Stages aims to raise awareness of the importance of independent music venues – both for the jobs they create and the opportunities they offer to emerging and indie musicians – and to lobby the government to come to the aid of these struggling places. The latest stimulus package does include $15 billion for Save Our Stages, but the sheer number of theaters, clubs and other venues hoping for a piece of that pie means that the need is still there. So this compilation will benefit the program, and features contributions by Langhorne Slim, Jesse Malin, Micah Nelson, and many others. Jim James, from the band My Morning Jacket, offers this no-frills but heartfelt version of the old gospel song “Leave It There.” Like many of the tracks, it has the sound of a home recording, but that somehow seems appropriate to the moment.