Babi

Touareg music hasn't always been about electric guitars and the Tamashek quartet Al Bilali Soudan (an ancient name for the city of Timbuktu) are torchbearers for a tradition that predates Thomas Edison by several centuries. Their songs are played on the three-stringed fretless tehardent (Tamashek for ngoni) with percussion provided by calabash and hand claps. Their first self-titled album a decade ago sounded like a field recording and the 2020 follow-up Tombouctou was every bit as unmediated in its primordial authenticity. Wisely, their record label has resisted any temptation to make the sound more sophisticated or to add ‘star guests’ on this third instalment. Instead we get hypnotically looping tunes, timeless chants and gutbucket vocals delivered with a proto-punk energy so unexpurgated that Al Bilali Soudan make Tinariwen sound like a Las Vegas show band. The four members are a family group of fathers and sons, cousins and uncles and there's an intuition in their interplay that sounds like they’ve been playing together for a thousand years – which, in a sense, they have. Yet there's nothing tired about the music of Babi which, on tunes such as ‘Yona’ and the fathomless blues of ‘Al Hamzia’, rocks as hard as you could wish.