Album Reviews
Amadou et Mariam - Welcome to Mali
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia live in a world where sound is everything. They met as teenagers at the Institute for the Young Blind in the West African nation of Mali, where Doumbia cultivated her blithe, songbird voice and Bagayoko developed his playful guitar plucking. They fell in love soon after, and, in 1980, they married and became known as “the blind couple from Mali.” Now, with Welcome to Mali, Bagayoko and Doumbia’s poppy African rhythms are infused with an electro-pop aesthetic that eschews expectations of music from the duo’s home continent. The track “Sabali” is produced by Damon Albarn, former Blur frontman and Gorillaz mastermind, who gently lays Doumbia’s wafting vocals adrift over synthy keyboard arpeggios and a subtly pulsing kick drum. Unlike Albarn’s Gorillaz project, Bagayoko and Doumbia lack kitschiness and, instead, capture a feeling absent from many releases in the early 2000s: genuineness. Their last album received the professional treatment from Latin superstar producer Manu Chao, and Welcome to Mali serves more of the funk soup that Chao whipped up on that record. Mixing irresistibly dance-y West African instrumentation and up- tempo dub with subtle electro, Welcome to Mali is the hub of many disparate musical styles. But every single song moves and quakes with near-flawless construction. On “Magossa,” Bagayoko’s guitar strums play against the stutter-stepping bass and dance with a delicate, floating flute line. Welcome to Mali repackages African music for the twenty-first century—and for an audience that sees the limitless possibilities and interplay of a global culture. Bagayoko and Doumbia have the vision.
from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 102 2009
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