Customer Reviews

Abacabok

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Tartit comes from roughly the same geographical area as Tinariwen. There, that was easy, wasn't it?

Not exactly. Tinariwen is well-known for their electrification of traditional Touareg forms. Tartit is much more acoustic and traditional. It is an entrancing, enchanting music that pulls at you more and more as you listen to it. The modal scales and massed vocals can be the perfect antidote to mass-produced Western pop/pap. Abacabok is definitely worth your time.

Spending the past week with Oumou Sangare's beautiful new Seya has spurned me into action. I've had Tartit's Abacabok for too long to go any longer without reviewing it.

There are 2 ways I fantasize about the Festival in the Desert. There are the big stage bands and there are the smaller happenings. Oumou Sangare and her band throw it down on a major level. They're obviously one of the big stage bands that could get 5,000 people dancing for 2 hours. When I think of Tartit, I think of them on a more intimate level. Tartit is at its best when playing something slow and hypnotically repetitive. They have a gritty earthiness, as if their music crawled up out of a crack in the sun-baked Malian soil. When they tour the USA they play very nice venues like the one at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk, but they don't need to. I tend to think of Tartit as being the ultimate band to play for 20 people from midnight to 2 or 3am under the desert sky. The crackling of the nighttime campfire would be as much a part of their music as their vocals. Their electric guitarist could stand barefoot in the dirt and run an $80 amp off of a car battery and melt souls. He is just the sort of ethereal-yet-dirty-a$$ desert blues player that should frighten the legions of gentrified electric guitar wieneys that populate the USA in recent decades. DEEP is the level of his expression.

For me, the first half of Abacabok is up and down. A few tracks have a lighter feel to them... a feel with which I've never been in love. Then Afel Bocoum is the guest lead vocal on track 5, and from track 6 onward we have a beautiful, hypnotic album. An album that conjures images of the Sahel, salt caravans, relentless wind, heat and camels. Still from Mali, yes, but the Tuareg Blues of Tartit have a more North African feel than the musics of Sangare, Toure, Diabate, etc...

Tartit is mellow body music. Oumou Sangare can make you dance until you sweat. Tartit is more likely to make you close your eyes and realize you've been rocking back and forth like a student in a madrassa for the past 20 minutes. Not so frenetic or frantic as those students, though. Calmly, quietly, as if mesmerized.