By: Andy Gill

The phrase "Aman Iman", in the Tamashek language of the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, means "Water is the soul", or "Water is life", and is often followed by "ach isoudar", meaning "and milk is survival". As such, it's an apt title for this latest album by Tinariwen, reflecting both the Tuaregs' ongoing struggle for survival in one of the harshest environments, and the need for more nourishing fare - both physically and intellectually - required to survive in the wider world.

Until Tinariwen were discovered a few years ago and started touring outside Africa, it was rare for any Tuareg to travel outside theirhomeland; and their isolation and lack of education served them poorly during the long dispute with the Malian government, an almost secret war that has gone largely unreported. Tinariwen formed in the rebel training camps of Algeria and Libya in the early 1980s, whence they had fled following the government's crushing of a 1963 insurrection in which the parents of several members, including those of charismatic frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, were brutally slain. Several songs here date from that era, notably Ibrahim's lament "Soixante Trois" and Alhassane Ag Touhami's "Tamatant Tilay", a 1983 war cry urging the Tuareg into battle.

The more recent songs, however, depict a significant change in attitude, with both "Matadjem Yinmixan" and "Toumast" calling on Tuareg tribes to cease their factional rivalries and feuds in order to deal more capably with the wider world. It's rare, in our age of instant communication, to encounter a culture that is only now on the cusp of some accommodation with the outside world, but that is effectively what is happening on Aman Iman, an album that deserves to hoist Tinariwen onto the international stage occupied by high-profile world music acts such as the Buena Vista Social Club and Ali Farka Touré.

Both those artists profited from the involvement of Ry Cooder - a role occupied here by Justin Adams, guitarist with Robert Plant and formerly Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart. As producer, Adams has captured brilliantly Tinariwen's characteristic blend of loping camel-gait rhythms, call-and-response vocal chants, and desert blues guitar lines.

The result is a mesmeric evocation of the mood of yearning inculcated through years of exile, and nourished by the vast emptiness of the desert - an "eternal longing", to use Ibrahim's phrase, which feeds the soul of their music, just as it once fed the blues of dispossessed African-Americans.