By Geoffrey Himes

Tinariwen: Imidiwan: Companions (World Village)
The desert herdsmen of northern Mali probably don't care that their plugged-in electric guitars and flatted-note vocals suggest echoes of John Lee Hooker and R.L. Burnside, but it matters to those of us in North America who are seeking a way to make sense of these eerie Saharan songs. If fellow Malian Ali Farka Toure had played on his nation's drier, wilder frontier with a battalion of drummers and a choir of singers, it might have sounded like this.