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Recent Reviews
Tinariwen Aman Iman: Water is Life Modiba/World Village, 2007

The kings and queens of desert folk rock have produced their most satisfying and fully realized recording to date. This is Tinariwen’s third CD since their 2001 international debut, but the group’s history goes back into the mysterious world of Touareg rebellion in the 1980s, as fighters moved through camps in Libya, Algeria and Mali, battling the elements and the Malian army, and merging the spirits of Bob Marley, John Lee Hooker, Ali Farka Toure, and Bob Dylan into their own guitar-driven anthems. Many of the songs on this album go back to those early times, like the reflective “Soixant Trois,” a remembrance of the brutally crushed 1963 Touareg uprising. In one of the first songs he ever composed, guitarist/singer Ibrahim Ag Alhabib sings with quiet certainty, “’63 has gone, but will return.” And he was right, living to fight himself in future uprisings, and better, to see the peace that came with the late 90s.

The themes of war, struggle, and desert life pervade these 12 tracks. Alhassane Ag Touhami’s “Tamatant Tilay (Death is Here)” essentializes the band’s most bracing electric sound with rolling thunder rhythm, singing, stinging electric guitar lines, and cracking, soulful lead voices answered by a big chorus punctuated by ululation. The song celebrates the ability to fight “without fearing death,” and you feel that commitment in every refrain. Another cranker, “Cler Achel (I Spent the Day)” laments the hardship of desert life during the droughts of the 1970s and 80s, all set to a pendulous backbeat with rich guitar layerings. These gnarly, blues edged numbers are interspersed with rootsier percussive fare, such as “Ahimana (Oh my Soul),” a traditional Touareg groove featuring spoken words by the group’s senior poet, Japonais. Here, guitar becomes commentator rather than leader. Then, there are folksy moments suggestive of a lonely campfire in the desert, like the plaintive love song “Ikyadarh Dim (I Look at You)” rendered with just clapping, acoustic guitar, and Ibrahim’s bone dry vocal.

Like Tinariwen’s earlier two albums, this one is produced by Justin Adams of the UK, a fine guitarist himself, who contributes modestly to a few tracks. Adams evolves the group’s sound subtly, bringing out rich, twangy guitar voices, and varying the density of the music to create spaces, vistas, and drama. But there is no hint of overreaching or artificiality here. The growing artistry we feel here belongs mostly to the musicians, who have been sharpened, while not even remotely corrupted, by their years of touring the world. Tinariwen’s most confident and best sounding album is also their most beautifully packaged, with stunning photographs, excellent background notes, and line by line translations of all the lyrics written in the Touareg tinifar alphabet, transliterated Tamashek, and English. Desert music is becoming a sub-genre these days, and a welcome one, but no group conveys the paradox, pain and ecstasy of the desert with more persuasive sincerity than Tinariwen.


Contributed by Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org