Electric Maryland
Ninth album from the Wassoulou soul singer finds her in the US, looking back to her roots.
Oumou Sangaré ★★★★ Timbuktu OUMSANG/WORLD CIRCUIT. CD/DL/LP
IT DOESN’T seem so long ago that unexpected moves by artists who weren’t in the first flush of youth were seen as desperate, self-harming attacks on their own credibility. “How do you do, fellow kids?” Ask David Bowie. Today, most MOJO readers would probably agree that your sixth decade is exactly the time to throw caution to the wind, learn new tricks and go a bit wild. There’s little to be lost by attempting career suicide.
It’s a mantra that appears to suit Oumou Sangaré: having spent 20 years building steadily on the success of her 1989 debut,
Moussolou, West Africa’s queen of soul took an eight-year break from recording before delivering 2017’s Mogoya, her electro album, at 49. After a brief pause, she issued Acoustic, much the same album but without the effects, as if to reassure the faithful. A promotional tour of the US followed, just as Covid-19 was raising its head, and rather than go home to Mali, she settled down in Maryland and fell in love with Baltimore, the Bamako – who knew? – of the eastern seaboard.
Locked down in a country she didn’t know particularly well, absorbing American culture close-up, and writing songs while separated from family and friends… put it all together, and it’s almost not a surprise that Timbuktu is her blues album. If that American music has its origins in the string-bending minstrels of the north of Mali, in Wassoulou (Sangaré’s home region) they play their notes straight, but funky. Just as Ali Farka Touré found a second wind collaborating with Ry Cooder, Sangaré has opened up new spaces in her customary sound, into which fit dobro and slide guitar (courtesy of co-producer Pascal
Danaë), right next to the kamele ngoni of Mamadou Sidibé.
Lyrically, she definitely feels the blues: Sira considers the delinquency of those from decent backgrounds (“The baobab tree’s trunk is smooth, but its fruits are rough”); Gniani Sara tackles the slings and arrows of being a woman in a man’s world (“One day, insults and bullying will be but a bad memory”); and Kêlê Magni rewrites Edwin Starr to powerful effect (“War has never built anything, it destroys all it finds”). Occasionally, admittedly, not understanding the words has its advantages: opener Wassulu Don is a magnificent slab of burning hot funk – very Black Keys – in praise of investment in schools, health centres and hotels.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you, though. If you’ve never sampled Oumou Sangaré before, Timbuktu is the perfect entrée, the one you won’t need to feel your way into. Without making concessions, she’s delivered her most accessible album yet, perhaps even her best. Where she goes next is anyone’s guess.
Arcade Fire ★★★★ WE COLUMBIA. CD/DL/LP
ARCADE FIRE’S transformation from postapocalyptic choir to glittery disco revue may have been a startling one, but their quality control was lost along the way. If 2013’s
Reflektor was patchy, then 2017’s Everything Now, with its ABBA moves and clunky word play – see Infinite Content’s “we’re infinitely content” – was distinctly ho-hum.
Five years later, on WE, with its pristine sonics polished by Nigel Godrich in cahoots with husband-and-wife bandleaders Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the Montrealformed
quintet are tapping back into what made them great in the first place. It’s there amid opener Age Of Anxiety I’s dynamic shift from throbbing tension and percussive panic attack breaths into an ’83 Eurythmics synth pulse and hands-in-the-air crescendo, or with the tempo-change headrush – built for live thrills – halfway through The Lightning I, II.
End Of Days vibes abounded in their first three albums, be it the feral kids of Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) or the bombs dropping on residential areas in The Suburbs. Now, our edgy times may well have caught up with Arcade Fire’s dark predictions and here there are visions of “tyres burning on Rodeo Drive” and “the sky breaking open”. The social media commentary is smarter, as in the haunting coda of Age Of Anxiety I where Butler’s lines, “It’s all about you”/“It’s not about you”, blur into one another.
The dance music elements on WE suit them better too. The New Order moves of Age Of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) are precision-tooled, and if its main hook (“Rabbit Hole/Yeah/Plastic soul/Yeah”) sounds at first too simple and daft a sentiment, then repeat plays turn it into a maddeningly catchy earworm. The only misstep is the Chassagne-fronted Human League-ish disco pop of Unconditional II (Race And Religion), an Everything Now hangover that even a surprise Peter Gabriel vocal cameo (just as underplayed as Bowie’s appearance on Reflektor) can’t enliven.
The big statement standout, meanwhile, is the nine-minute End Of The Empire I-IV, which aims at Aladdin Sane and makes a direct hit. Opening with barroom piano, 12-string acoustic guitar and tears brimming in Butler’s eyes as he watches “the moon on the ocean/ Where California used to be”, it moves, guided by stirring orchestration, through Mick Ronson sustained guitar notes, Woody Woodmansey rapid-fire snare fills and fluttering saxophone to a defiant,
“I am Spartacus”-styled “I unsubscribe/She unsubscribes” rejection of the information age. As a distillation of everything Arcade Fire are about, it’s utterly brilliant. Moreover, the Bowie homage is reinforced on the album artwork – an imagining of supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* as the pupil in a human eye, hand-tinted by Hunky Dory/…Ziggy… airbrush artist Terry Pastor.
This tight, seven-track, 40-minute-long record ends on a note of something approximating hope, with its lovely acousticfolk title track (echoing Led Zeppelin’s Tangerine) and ‘imagine no possessions’ sentiment. Ultimately, then, WE is Arcade Fire’s best album since 2010’s The Suburbs.
By circling back, they’re once again moving forward.