Aboogi

All aboard the Touareg camel train once again for Imarhan’s third album Aboogi – and a serene, timeless trip across the desert it is, too. The recent trend among Touareg guitar bands has been for every release to try to rock harder than what has gone before, but here the group led by Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam), dial it down with a semi-acoustic record full of haunting beauty.

After their first two albums were recorded in exile in France, perhaps it was the joy of being able to record for the first time in their home city of Tamanrasset in southern Algeria that persuaded them to relax and chill. The result is an album that sounds markedly different from the traditional Tinariwen template. True, the electric guitars still get cranked up here and there, such as on the desert blues coda to the otherwise gentle opener ‘Achinkad’, but Aboogi is in effect a Touareg folk-rock record on which the rhythms pulse with a subtle transcendence. The collaborations with Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas on the mournful ‘Taghadart’ and Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys singing in Welsh on ‘Adar Newlan’ are smartly done, too.