Travel changes you. It has to. There's no way to experience something outside of the familiar and not be affected, if only in the smallest way. Tinariwen come from a people whose history is travel. The Kel Tamashek (aka the Touareg) have inhabited the vast expanse of the middle Sahara for centuries, living nomadically in a place no one else much visited, never mind called home. The area today is split between Algeria, Libya, Niger, and Mali-- modern ideas about borders and nation states leave little room for wandering peoples, and so the last few decades in the region have seen intermittent violence and displacement as they've fought to maintain their culture and lifestyle in a world that isn't built to accommodate it.
Lately, the members of Tinariwen have done a lot of traveling of another sort: touring as an internationally successful rock band. It's hard to imagine any of them had any inkling they'd be performing an in-store show at Other Music in Manhattan when they formed the band in the camps over the border from Mali. At any rate, they've experienced a lot of the world outside the desert they grew up in, and it seems to have influenced the new direction of their latest album, Imidiwan: Companions. Where their last album, Aman Iman: Water Is Life, was urgent, rebellious, and wrapped up in the importance of Kel Tamashek identity, down to taking its title from the first half of a Tamashek proverb, this new one feels different in spite of only slight changes in overall sound. Recorded in the band's hometown of Tessalit in the mountains of Mali's deep-desert northeastern Kidal region, this is a celebration of a return to the desert and of the people who live there, a communal album with lots of big choral vocals and time set aside for breathtaking flights on the guitar.
And so the songs largely have a little less individual punch here-- the album instead invites you into a soundworld shaped by geography. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the haunting closer, "Desert Wind", a whisper of an instrumental that seems to consist of nothing but the movement of electric guitar strings by the breeze. Lyrically, the songs, sung in Tamashek, visit themes of liberation and cultural-historical pride, as well as assuf, an untranslatable word with implications of homesickness, loneliness, and sadness; it also refers to the nighttime world beyond the light of the campfire. "Assuf Ag Assuf" lies at the center of the record's odd second half, where the intensity level rises considerably. It's one of two songs to feature a strange, ethereal expansion of the band's signature guitar sound, the lead lines sliding, reverberant, and ghostly in support of the weathered vocals.
"Kel Tamashek" is less spaced-out, building a propulsive song around a central drone that remains pensive all through, without ever exploding into the kind of dust storm guitar outbursts you get on "Lulla" or "Ere Tasfata Adounia". It's an even sharper contrast to the positively languid album opener, "Imidiwan Afrik Temdam", which is dominated by the chorus. That Imidiwan doesn't quite have the bracing crunch of its predecessor is no great criticism-- this album is the sound of a band growing musically as it adjusts to its new global platform. There is a unique magic to the sounds of the Sahara. Imidiwan captures that magic with skillful grace.
