Since forming in 2000, Tal National have been on a quest to make it known to the world that Niger is not in fact Nigeria. Besides everything else, musically, the land-locked Sahelian nation never went through the same kind of cosmopolitan musical explosion that many other West African nations did in the 1960s post-independence era. Only around the turn of the century have some Nigerien artists broken into the international market, including Mamar Kassey and Tuareg groups like Etran Finatawa or Bombino. And now, of course, Tal National.
While Tal National’s 2008 sophomore album A Na Waya made them the most popular group in Niger, their following album and first international release Kaani officially established them outside the continent. Led by band leader Hamadal Issoufou Moumine and produced by Chicago-based engineer Jamie Carter, Kaani was a joyful barrage of traditional Hausa and Zarma vocals, soukous guitars, reggae synths, and percussion, all rolled up into a decidedly rock aesthetic. Then as now, Tal National took great pride in representing the ethnic diversity of Niger in their music and in their large rotating cast of band members. On their second-ever international release, Zoy Zoy, they build on Kaani and amplify everything to the nth degree.
Zoy Zoy's themes are as diverse as the traditions it pulls from. On "Sey Wata Gaya", for example, Tal National sing about refuting ongoing Islamist denouncements of their secular music. The bed of the track comprises a melismatic guitar riff repeating over and over against a Mandingue kora motif. In "Tenere", they sing about the violent ouragan (windstorm) of the Ténéré desert, a region frequented by the Tuareg. Fittingly, they cycle through a Tuareg assouf riff, which ripples mirage-like over hissy, subdividing hi-hats and a steady kick drum beat. The Hausa and Zarma vocals—mainly male lead vocal and female backing vocals—bound and echo across these arrangements. Altogether, these threads form a sort of tangled maze of melodic lines and jagged edges, interlocking motifs that repeat themselves like squares in a kaleidoscope.
The music is colorful and bright and dizzying. It recalls the energy and wall-of-sound quality of Konono No 1, except more frenzied and texturally varied. Tal National are masters of lightning-speed time changes too, able to lock into a slower bluesy guitar solo as easily as an impromptu mbalax dance break (see "Farila"). In spots, the group even tap into some old school Ethiopian tizita vibes, but sped-up and with a hypnotic psych rock edge.
That hypnotic effect is nowhere more evident than in the last two tracks. "Kodaje" and "Saraounia" are dances of possession. The tracks’ namesakes are spirits (genie in French*)*, the former Zarma and the latter Hausa, and both can speak through those they possess. The lead vocalist sings himself into a fever pitch, chanting and grunting and careening—this is the distilled version of the energy that propels the entire album. And it’s this energy that holds Zoy Zoy together, whether they be singing about fundamentalist pushback, the desert, or women.
Tal National’s ability to weave together all these thematic and musical elements with unflagging speed and energy is breathtaking. But it can also feel claustrophobic at times, especially when listening the whole way through and with headphones on. The two or three different polyrhythmic guitar lines present on every track are more or less split between the left and right channels. So to those raised on Western music, it can feel like getting caught between multiple conversations—albeit interesting ones. Listening through speakers, on the other hand, opens up another dimension of the album—you can visualize where the artists are positioned as they play. The artists’ emerge spatially before the listener, as if performing live, and Tal National are, first and foremost, a live band. They are the ouragan that they sing of—a thing hardly containable in the space of mere megabytes.
