Albums of the Year # 49 Tinariwen - Amatssou

 

Oh dear. I've miscalculated in my countdown. You get two more today.

Tinariwen are truly one of the most wonderful bands of our age. Something to check the time on the clocks of your house by. They've been riding the dunes of their spiritual desert for over twenty years now and show no sign of stopping now. If anything they seem to be gathering pace.

Originally a collective of Tuareg musicians from the Southern Desert of Northern Mali, they've come to evoke something entirely larger and more enveloping down the years, for those of us unfamiliar with their specific region. Their's is a sound of spiritual defiance and freedom. 

For their latest album Amatssou, (and they're not particularly prolific), they're working with Daniel Lanois, which seems entirely natural and perhaps dilatory. Still, better late than never. Because the band are in rude health here, giving us a glimpse of a world and anima that most of us will never experience entirely.

Amatssou conjurs up a whole visual and spiritual universe of the sort we only really know from the TV and Cinema screen. It rises and falls like the hot and hostile world they hail from, but you always know you're in very safe hands and they will guide you with care and wisdom and an infallible inner compass, until you find yourself at your destination, ready for a bathe and the comforting sheets of your hotel bed..

I'm not well enough versed in Tinariwen's back catalogue to place this record within it. I only know it's another damned good one. Hot off the desert press as they say.