Consumer Guide Album

Tamikrest: Adagh [Glitterbeat, 2010]
Led, not to say dominated, by an impressive twentysomething singer-songwriter-guitarist named Ousmane ag Massa, this Tuareg guitar group came together at a Western-funded private school designed to protect the desert people from a Malian educational system that's stacked against them. They're vocal about their debt to Tinariwen, founders and leaders of their musical/political movement, but from the opening riff of their 2010 debut they don't favor Tinariwen's austerity. "He watches a world in movement evolving beyond him," that song translates, and they want better than to watch. Quite often you can hear how much. B+