It’s only rock’n’roll?
Algerian Tuaregs’ third album adds to the sweep of an epic history lesson, reckons David Hutcheon.
Imarhan ★★★★ Aboogi CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
ARE YOU READY for the country? The further we get from the initial surprise that the ‘desert blues’ exist, the more each album reveals about the lives of the protagonists. Rather than setting up the music as a scene in which competing yet complementing bands joust for a hearing – à la Britpop, or whatever – the Tuaregs’ records coalesce to form a single narrative, different parts of one story delivered in varying voices yet, ultimately, unified. A Mahabharata or Ramayana for the Tamashek people who once reigned unchallenged across northern Africa.
“We give space to the wind, the sun and the sand,” says Sadam, the band’s nominal leader. “We want to express their colours through music.” That this synaesthesia is the goal will be no surprise to anyone used to the atmospheres Tinariwen argued to have present on their more expansive albums, once they could drag producers out to Kidal to record, surrounded by the heat-shattered rock, sand, aquifers and oasis that shape their view of the world, with its vast skies and 360-degree horizons.
Imarhan’s 11 songs come wrapped in a soundscape; a surround-sound version would have the guitars and vocals central, but dust devils and translucent scorpions in the corners of your room, a sweet tea bubbling away and, after dark, the shuffling of a hyena behind the settee. The music expands to fill the space. That said, a slightly prosaic complaint: there are at least a couple of songs that end just as the listener is settling down for 30 minutes of endless aboogi… sorry, “endless boogie” …and you know the producer must be sitting on tapes that would make awesome 12-inch extended mixes. Just saying…
Anyway, that’s the spiel, the “why you should listen”; you probably have a decent idea what this album sounds like, who it sounds quite like. Imarhan eschew the robes and traditions of Tinariwen – they wear jeans and leather jackets and heavy boots, because these are practical in the Sahara – but guests include Abdallah and Japonais from that pioneering outfit, and they sing a song, Tindjatan, about a defeat the Tuaregs suffered at the hands of the French before colonisation. They don’t have an axe hero like Mdou Moctar but they do get Gruff Rhys in to sing about kinship in Welsh (Adar Newlan).
Aboogi – a trad Tuareg term for a semipermanent dwelling – may only be the latest chapter in a humungous epic, something that will make total sense finally viewed from several centuries’ distance, but it’s a reminder that walls and boundaries exist primarily in the head, that we all have a huge space in which to exist. It feels comforting right now. A small part of something bigger. Just like us.