Hali Diallo

For a lot of Touareg desert blues, the drums are the well of rhythm in the undergrowth of the music, freeing up the guitars and vocals to work their magic uninhibited. Listen to any song by Tinariwen or Tamikrest and you'll feel them pulsating away in the backdrop. For the Takamba music of Tallawit Timbouctou, however, the drums play a completely different role. They are front and centre, bashing out rhythms in time signatures that are impossible to pin down. Instead of providing the chassis for the engine, the Takamba drums are the engine, revving on side-by-side with the psychedelic sounds of the tehardent, the four-stringed Malian lute that is the precursor to the American banjo. Yet while this is a powerful sound that you can imagine booming out of dusty boomboxes along the streets of Timbuktu, for a whole album it becomes hard to listen to. The sounds are so relentless and the tracks so homogenous that it feels slightly like a 45-minute assault on the ears, with the only respite coming from the short pauses in which vocalist Aghaly Ag Amoumine delivers his spoken-word lyricism. It is an interesting genre and good for a few tracks, but perhaps not suited to the album format.