World music fans have already been exposed to the contemporary
music of the Tuareg, the displaced nomads of the southern Sahara,
through the band Tinariwen. Toumast offers a similar approach with
desert dry, bluesy electric guitar riffs accompanying hand-slapped
percussion and call-and-response vocals that zigzag across the trance
grooves. The sound is obviously derived from exposure to Western rock
and the legacy of ancestral traditions, converging in something that
suggests Mississippi Delta blues from a parallel universe.
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