Tears of Injustice

Mdou Moctar, dubbed ‘the Hendrix of the Sahara’ for his blistering electric guitar riffs, has, on this acoustic companion piece to last year’s Funeral for Justice, morphed into ‘the Dylan of the desert.’ Accompanied by traditional instruments from his native Niger, and singing in the Tamashek dialect spoken in parts of North and West Africa, Moctar turns out plaintiff, folksy versions of the hard hitting protest songs from his 2024 Touareg rock album. Where Funeral for Justice’s anthemic ‘Tchinta’ sounded like a raucous stadium-filler, the stripped down Tears’ version is more like a round-the-campfire sing-a-long lament. As his label Matador Records proclaims, “if Funeral… was the sound of outrage, Tears… is the sound of grief. Even without amplification, the message – in more melancholic form – still gets through loud and clear. These are songs, according to Matador, “steeped in sadness, conveying the grief of a nation locked into a constant churn of poverty, colonial exploitation and political upheaval.”