Tinariwen – Aman Iman

This entry was posted by owl and bear staff on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 12:59 am.

2007, World Village

If you are sick of tepid Western interpretations of African music, check out the real thing.

Tinariwen are from Mali. They roamed the Sahara desert for a while and played weddings and indigenous festivals. Most of them have been touched by war, whether actively or by losing loved ones. Their name is the plural form of a word that means “desert” or “empty place.” They speak Tamashek, a dialect of the Touareg language, so don’t expect to understand much of what they say.

But oh, do they rock, and not in a conventional American sense of the word. They do have three guitarists playing at once (a setup that unfortunately brings to mind some sort of desert-rat Skynyrd) but because of how the rhythm section and guitars interlock with each other, the sound is more reminiscent of Crazy Horse than anything else.

Tinariwen’s new album, Aman Iman, is filled with wild grooves, chanting, and more ululation than you can shake a stick at. The men sound like they could be 100 years old and the women all sound like children. And even though Tinariwen sing in another language, the guitars do most of the talking as they slip and slide around each other in a side-winding fashion that begs for repeated listenings.

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