Word: bamako
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...blind thing is certainly played for effect--just not the effect you might anticipate. Almost since their first meeting, in 1976 as students at Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Amadou and Mariam have billed themselves as the Blind Couple of Mali, and if the lack of an exclamation point reads as restraint, factor in that they often perform in diamond-studded sunglasses. Faced with a world that tends to view blindness and African-ness in tragic terms, Amadou Bagayoko (he plays a killer guitar) and Mariam Doumbia (she sings like an adoring aunt) go out of their...
...understand just how great, listen to the pair's fifth album, Welcome to Mali, out March 24. Following up on their 2005 breakthrough, Dimanche à Bamako, which was produced by France-raised Spaniard Manu Chao and topped critics' lists worldwide, Amadou and Mariam recruited another international rock star, Brit Damon Albarn, for a cameo. What Albarn brings is an opener, "Sabali," so light and giddy that no translation is required to get that Mariam is whisper-singing about love. The swirling keyboards and gradually rising dance beat are pure '80s pop, sweeter than cheap champagne--but with soul...
Dimanche A Bamako...
Best Tracks: Senegal Fast Food, Taxi Bamako...
...Amadou & Mariam Dimanche A Bamako; $18.98 World music doesn't have a reputation for fun, and Amadou & Mariam, the self-proclaimed Blind Couple of Mali, might not seem the likeliest candidates to rock the boat. But a) they wear the coolest shades in the history of sightlessness, and b) they have partnered with Spanish-French producer Manu Chao, whose interest in multiculturalism stops at every country's best pop hooks. Listening to the fusion of Amadou & Mariam's polyrhythmic blues with Chao's exuberant rip-offs is like watching another nation's most hysterically bad TV; you feel...