Tinariwen – ‘Amatssou’ album review
Reaching the lofty total of nine studio albums is a feat for any band, but for Tinariwen it is a god damn miracle, and for all us sinners listening on it is still a sweet godsend. With Amatssou, they once again breeze their way towards hopeful defiance with a strange wail of influences – banjos, fiddles, pedal steels and post-production flourishes from the legendary producer Daniel Lanois, all enter their mix – making for a singular swell of music that quenches the soul’s thirst for spiritualism in these hectic times like the first sip of a cold drink after ambling to a watering hole on a hot summer’s day.
The music in question is often referred to as Saharan Blues, a term in which the word ‘blues’ is doing a lot of work. There is no place on Earth quite as befitting of the blues as the North African region of the Sahara. It is a stretch of land where the first adjective to come to mind is ravaged; ravaged by the blistering sun, increasing climate-driven desertification, colonialism, then post-colonial disorder, socio-economic divides, political unrest, and many more horrors. However, as always, where despair resides, the tonic of music follows, and the great cultural boon of life has certainly not deserted the people of the Sahara. Tinariwen are a band who still exemplify that in their work.
The story of Tinariwen sadly serves as a tragic tableau for how the desert sound came to be. If there was ever any doubt about how unrest rules the roost for the world’s most hardy residents, then the tale of frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib should dispel it for good. Aged four, he witnessed his own father’s execution by Malian Military officials. Most of his days thereafter were spent in Algerian refugee camps. In these camps, he saw a western film in which a cowboy played the guitar and was so spellbound that he decided to craft one of his own using a watering can, a stick, and some fishing wire. Somehow such a rudimentary start eventually produced Jimi Hendrix-like hammer-on results.
Fittingly, as is the culture of his people, he has now wandered towards an array of new influences, he welcomes these more than ever before with this latest effort. The plan this time out was to fly over to America to record with Lanois and an assortment of country musicians to bring a fresh angle to their sound. However, sadly a few issues like Covid-19 put a halt to this. Instead, Lanois’ handpicked musicians travelled to Tinariwen. So, the band’s last album was recorded at a camp in Mauritania under the chandelier of Saharan stars.
Amatssou was then recorded in a make-shift studio located in the Tassili N’Ajjer National Park, a giant sandstone plateau famous for its 10,000 years old prehistoric cave art. And I’ll be damned if the record doesn’t mystically capture some of that primordial energy. Amid the chanted choral energy of tracks like ‘Arajghiyine’ you truly get a sense of the surrounding atmosphere and the aeons of time it has seen pass by.
However, what makes Amatssou so remarkable is that it plays forward in a thrilling fashion too. The collision of sounds and Lanois’ technological tweaks are not just signs of a band reaching their ninth album and thinking, ‘Well, we might as well experiment’. They vitalise the album with a potent sense of culture in flux and sharpen its brooding intent too.
To understand this, you must understand the band’s journey to here. The Tuareg people have existed for centuries, bound not by borders but by a shared nomadic culture and the language of Tamasheq. Now that existence is threatened on all fronts. Tinariwen have had to fight to forge an existence as a band. Many more are likely to follow in their footsteps as the region’s climate, hostile but stable for thousands of years, suddenly begins to change, creating a growing number of climate refugees. One billion people are likely to suffer from this fate by 2050, and, with them, thousands of years’ worth of discreet cultures are at risk. Or as Amatssou seamlessly asserts with its country-woven sound, maybe they’re not?
So, while this extensive background might not be typical of an ‘album review’, it is essential to highlight the profundity of this record, because the force of it will not be lost on even the most casual listener just leaning into the lilting tones and wanting to know where this luscious atmosphere comes from is part of the triumph. With Amatssou, Tinariwen have captured the sound of a bold revolution. A revolution of music that deals with troubled transitions through the subversive pacificism of transcendent sound.
This sound offers cognisance of the pains of a persecuted people, and through blissful exultation from those pains, Amatssou champions the spirit of the unconquerable nomadic soul of old. The collection of hymns that are gleamingly singualr; they are not so much new, more so a revolutionary revitalising of cultural honour in a modernising world. This liberated space is one happy to mix and embrace influences. Amatssou proves that engaging in the welter of the world at large does not diminish the core strength of the central source, it only makes it a little bit more interesting, a little more alluringly unique.
This musical blossoming from the area hardest hit by geopolitical and climate enforced change shows that although cultures may be forced to transition, the tragedy can still be transfigured into something beautiful, empowering an identity that could otherwise be lost. Amatssou does that beautifully over 12 tracks that sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and yet remain as timeless as anything you’ve ever heard. It is a rare thing indeed that something that carries that much weight seems to float up from your turntable like the smell that follows summer rain.
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