Since first listening to this album, I have become unable to effectively focus my ear on anything else. The hum of traffic, screams of children and gusting wind make no impact on me when Imidiwan plays. Instead, I am in another place, another time, another life where I am oblivious to consequence. Tinariwen‘s fourth album is a weighty intoxicating treat.
Aside from translated song titles, the average listener will have no other method to gauge lyrical content as the entirety of the album is sung in the languages of the Toureg (Tamashek and French) with natural spiritual undertones.
The warm greetings of ‘Imidiwan Afrik Tendam’ (My friends from all over Africa), feature the myriad elements fundamental to the band while second track ‘Lulla’ cranks the pace with offbeat hypnotic rhythms and pulsating vocals.
With an ability to comfortably accommodate musical diversity, pigeonhole Tinariwen at your peril. Though Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni‘s rolling, blues guitar trills ride on in tracks like ‘Tenhert’ (The Doe) and the psychedelic ‘Tahuly In’ (My Salutation) they practically vanish on the meditative ‘Chegret’ (The Thread) and are patiently tempered on the entrancing, droning ‘Kel Tamashek‘ (The Tamashek People).
To try to effectively capture the depths this exquisitely produced record plumbs, the non-Malian can only guess at its cultural richness. Forgoing any wish to patronise Imidiwan, the thick flavours it supplies are smoky, enduring and mildly hallucinogenic.
A band with a proud heritage, this album spits in the face of compromise and the morally ambiguous business of music that ostensibly demands it: we are richer for its existence, if only temporarily.
Imidiwan is released on June 29th (Independiente)