Tamotaït

If the mighty Tinariwen are the gate-opening Beatles of Touareg guitar music and Songhoy Blues are the genre's answer to The Clash, could Tamikrest be the Saharan Pink Floyd, taking the desert blues sound into a new world of cosmic sonic adventures? A crass analogy, perhaps, but it more or less works, for the band's fifth album rocks and riffs powerfully via a set of by now familiar guitar tropes before ambitiously setting the controls for more galactic territory on the pysch-mood pieces ‘Azawad’, ‘Tihoussay’ (which boasts possibly the loveliest pop melody in the whole of the Touareg canon) and ‘Tabsit’. On the latter, Aghaly Ag Mohamedine sings hauntingly over interlocking guitars and two traditional Japanese stringed instruments, the shamisen and tonkori, to create a kind of ambient Touareg prog-rock that sounds like the sort of thing Eno and David Byrne might cook up. There's more of a full-throated roar to the opener ‘Awnafin’ and the taut, visceral dynamics of ‘Anha Achal Wad Namda’. But with the band still in exile due to the ongoing conflict in their homeland, ‘Amzagh’ and ‘As Sastnan Hidjan’ are more meditative reflections on what the future may hold for their people while the Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra offers an ethereal and welcomed female voice to trance-like ‘Timtrain’.