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CD Review
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Stereophile, CD Review >>
TINARIWEN Aman Iman: Water Is Life
World Village 468067 (CD). 2007.
Known to outsiders as Tuaregs, the Tamashek-speaking people of the southwestern Sahara are a Berber-related group--neither black nor Arab--whose caravans once transported West African slaves across the desert. In her liner notes to Ali Farka Toure's Radio Mali, Lucy Duran wrote that "in [John Lee] Hooker's music especially [Toure] heard echoes of Tamashek music." But while he sometimes sang in Tamashek himself, Toure had to interrupt his musical career to defend his farm near Timbuktu when his Tuareg neighbors rebelled against the government in the early 1990s.
Tinariwen--the word means "empty spaces" or "deserts"--was founded in the 1980s by young Tuareg rebels from Mali who discovered electric guitars while exiled in Algeria and Libya after a previous uprising. Their cassettes helped foment the off-and-on insurgency, but by the time they released their first internationally distributed CD in 2001, their message had become more humanitarian than militant. Since then, their hypnotic brand of trance-dance psychedelic blues-rock has earned them star status in Europe and attracted the admiration of Robert Plant, Carlos Santana, and the Rolling Stones.
Aman Iman: Water is Life, Tenerife's third CD, is their best yet, combining heavy-metal crunch with the filigreed delicacy of Tuareg tradition. Most of the songs are by the group's Medusa-haired frontman, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, with others by his fellow singer-guitarists Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, Alhassane Ag Touliami, and Mohammed Ag Itlale, the last a returning former member known as Japonica. The guitars deftly connect the dots between Ali Farka Toure, John Lee Hooker, and Led Zeppelin, while the ululating chorus and handclapped percussion ground the music firmly in the desert sands.
Outstanding tracks include Ag Alphabet's hard-grinding, hook-heavy rockers "Clerk Ache," "Assoil," and "Maladies Immixing"-the first two expressing the pain of exile, the third pleading for Tuareg unity. With lines such as "We kill our enemies and become like eagles" (printed in the booklet but omitted from the CD itself), Ag Tsunami's irresistibly bluesy "Termagant Tile" hints that the group hasn't entirely abandoned armed struggle. If the album has a non-moral flaw, it's that the recording, done at a studio in the Malian capital of Bamako, is mixed too hot, so that the bass tends to break up. The musicians generate more than enough heat on their own.
-Larry Birnbaum 10/01/07
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