Consumer Guide Album

Tamikrest: Toumastin [Glitterbeat, 2011]
This is the kind of second album where the group flowers rather than the kind where the group runs out of material. Read the trots and there's an arc, budding romance through to sustaining love, with plenty of self-doubt and plenty of solidarity in between. Listen to the music and you may get similar notions, although obviously they'll be more inchoate; I like the way troubled thoughts about alienation transition to lively celebration of a desert "full of liberty" to rousing call to fellowship to the solemn knowledge that "nothing is eternal." My theory is that it takes a man aware of his existential doubts to commit to the desert without committing to the absolute at the same time, and that this comes out in the music. Ousmane ag Massa is here to tell the world that a little education can be a broadening thing. A-