Imidiwan: Companions (Outside Music)

You can feel and hear the west Sahara’s heat on Tinariwen’s latest album. The last part of the long final track paints a spare soundscape evoking an endless horizon and a sun that’s like a slowly pounding sledgehammer. A single note is electronically stretched for several minutes, pulsing and reverberating over percussive harmonics that are lightly tapped out on a guitar’s strings.

The temperature stays high throughout this brilliantly mesmeric album of electric-folk music. The core sextet, with a little help from a lot of friends, performs both original and traditional Tuareg material. Tinariwen’s sound is raw, unpolished, and deeply soulful. Its songs are characterized by jangling and intermeshing guitars and call-and-response vocals atop a tightly threaded carpet of loping bass lines, funk-inspired strumming, handclaps, and hand drums.

Tinariwen—coming to Vancouver in February as part of the Cultural Olympiad—includes a DVD in this package, a poetic documentary on the social context and the making of Imidiwan: Companions. The quality of the packaging is excellent: each song warrants a full page in the notes, including careful English translations and complete instrumentation. There are plenty of pics, and the Tuareg artwork is vibrant. So if you’re feeling a bit rain-stunned, let Tinariwen lead you to a North African oasis, where camels are ridden instead of smoked, and you’ll feed on honeydew.