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CD Review
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Dirty Linen, CD Review >>
-by Bill Chaisson
This Touareg collective came together in the refugee camps of northern Mali, where, encountering electric guitars for the first time, Touareg musicians transferred their tribal music to a modern medium. The result is transfixing. The sound seems vaguely connected to music made by black Malians further south (e.g. Ali Farka Toure), but it has a fierce, loping pace that evokes the harsh but beautiful landscape of the Sahara and the Touareg's nomadic way of life.
Guitarist and singer Ibrahim Ag Alhabib is the principal songwriter for the band, but each song seems very much like a group effort. Each track begins with a simple repeated phrase on the guitar, which almost seems like the imitation of a natural sound that the musician has heard in the air around him. The percussion then kicks in, and the rhythm whips the guitar phrases around, bending, twisting, expanding them. It almost feels like a journey begun at sunrise: The birds begin to sing, the wind begins to blow, and the sand bites into your skin.
The band consists of three guitarists, a bass player, two percussionists, and female vocalists. There are often at least two melodic leads intertwining as a song climbs towards its feverish climax with the bass creating tension by seeming to trap the percussion in a gravitational field. At sporadic intervals the women begin to ululate. "Outside in the distance two wildcats did growl/Two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl." Indeed. 08/01/07
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