Bomba Estéreo To Release New Album Elegancia Tropical Due Out November 6th. by Tom Pryor

After conquering the world in 2009 with their international debut Blow Up Colombian electro-cumbia collective Bomba Estéreo are back this November with a brand new album on the label that first launched them.

Elegancia Tropical will be due out on Polen records on November 6th, the same Bogota-based label that released the band's first album, Vol. 1 back in 2006. After their breakthrough success with the release of Blow Up on the L.A.-based Nacional label, Bomba Estéreo toured the world and popped up at just about every major festival from Coachella to Roskilde, before returning home to record their newest album.

Elegancia Tropical reunites the core duo of singer Liliana "Li" Saumet, bassist and mastermind Simón Mejía with Kike Egurrola on drums and Julián Salazar on guitar for a beachside romp through everything from cumbia to chicha to dancehall. It promises to be a scorcher.

Full press release reprinted below:

Bomba Estereo is back with Elegancia Tropical

"It's all about the happiness," Bomba Estéreo's incandescent vocalist Liliana Saumet likes to exclaim. And the cumbia-powered, electro-shimmering party now continues on Elegancia Tropical (Polen Records; November 6, 2012), the long-expected follow-up from Bogota's hottest band, named for the bad-ass sound systems that are the heart of local parties.

Recorded beachside, Elegancia Tropical takes a deeper dive into Colombia's Afro-Latin roots and beats, without losing the edgy drive and good times that propelled Bomba Estéreo up charts and onto hip festival stages from Coachella to Bonnaroo. Building tracks from the Afro-Colombia beat up, Bomba Estéreo organically transforms the traditional into the fresh, jumping from chicha and champeta to dancehall vibes.

With the prefect balance of day-glo electronics and earthy cumbia rumbles, the band keeps it bold and bright, rocking club-friendly but clever party anthem ("Pure Love"), grabbing groundbreaking Brazilian MC BNegaOld habits die hard. If you go back as far as the radio-and-records era, you were probably used to having a cd – or if you were lucky, a vinyl album – to refer to for song titles and now-archaic things like liner notes and musician credits. As fast as all those things are disappearing, jazz bloggers are obsessive about them. But sometimes it pays to resist OCD and leave the news release and the promo copy out of sight and just get a handle on the music. That’s the approach that everybody ought to take with the International String Trio’s new album Movie Night. Just listening to Slava Tolstoy’s nimble gypsy jazz guitar, Ben Powell’s elegantly nuanced violin and Ippei Ichimaru’s terse bass will get your head bopping and eliminate any prejudices that might arise from a peek at the credits.

Here’s why – this is a concept album, a collection of the band’s favorite movie music. It’s not known what opinions the band have, if any, about the movies themselves. Which is why it’s best just to catch the lively, carefree violin and gypsy jazz allusions on the breezy first track and ask yourself, what on earth is that? It’s too straightforward to be a pop song and you probably won’t recognize it, and here’s why: it’s the Feather Theme from Forrest Gump. In case you’re wondering, there’s nothing from Xanadu, or any of the Friday or Elvis movies here – although all those flicks, forgettable as they were, all had some good tunes.

If gypsy jazz is your thing, you will enjoy the trio’s versions of the two Django Reinhardt classics here: the group gives them both the groove and the bite those songs deserve. What is that sad waltz with the biting violin solo out? That’s I Will Wait for You, a Michel Legrand composition from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And what’s that jaunty early swing number? Singing’ in the Rain? That’s right – these guys transform that moldy old schlockfest into something actually listenable.

Track six is a pensive, pretty ballad: could this be French? No, it’s the Schindler’s List Theme, by John Williams. That other understatedly moody, pretty waltz? Stephen Flaherty’s Once Upon a December, from the film Anastasia. And that sprightly Irish reel? That’s anacoustic cover of the Dropkick Murphy’s I’m Shipping Up to Boston and it’s way better than the original, Sox fans be damned!

Is that other waltz Haydn? No, it’s Shostakovich, done nonchalantly as gypsy jazz with Powell out front and center. David Raksin’s Theme from Laura is well-known, as is Maurice Jarre’s Somewhere My Love – but who knew that one had a laid-back, minor intro before the syrupy theme kicks in? The album closes with a matter-of-fact version of the Tennessee Waltz – wait a minute, that’s Ashokan Farewell. Aw heck, all those old folksingers ripped each other off. Who is the audience for this? Gypsy jazz fans may find these takes inspired but some of the source material on the weak side; otherwise, fans of the more accessible side of chamber and folk music won’t go wrong giving this a spin.o for a hard-hitting track ("Rocas"), and swaying with sweet Afro-Caribbean funk (" El Alma y El Cuerpo").