Gig review: Tinariwen, Òran Mór, Glasgow

IT’S painfully ironic that while the publicity for Tinariwen’s latest album, the Grammy-winning Tassili, sought to distance the Touareg desert bluesmen from their former guerrilla image, their tribespeople’s rebellion in northern Mali could see them swapping their guitars for guns.

Thursday’s ceasefire hopefully renders this more unlikely, but Tinariwen’s charismatic frontman, Ibrahim ag Alhabib, has nonetheless bowed out of their tour to help with the humanitarian crisis and was substituted here by former member Touhami Agalhassane.

The complexities of the Malian conflict – including the Touareg’s century-long history of oppression and exile, the new revolt’s reinforcement by combat experience during the Libyan uprising and the vexed question of Islamist involvement – highlight the difficulties with western audiences’ reflex tendency to characterise “world” musicians as righteous underdogs.

Which isn’t at all to deny that Tinariwen’s music embodies a fight for cultural survival, but without this contextual foreknowledge, it’s hard to imagine them building such a large international fanbase.

With its clanging, rolling guitar riffs and semi-chanted or call-and-response vocals, their sound’s melodic and rhythmic compass is repetitively narrow, such one song blurred cumulatively into another.

Judged purely as a listening experience, in other words, it was lacklustre and dull.

Rating: **