NOTHING’S NEW

Some time ago I promised to write more about musical discoveries I’d made. But at the time of that pledge, I’d temporarily forgotten how difficult it is to find bands that haven’t already been uncovered and written about by other media. Take for example Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from the Southern Sahara whose music sounds like a mixture of Ali Farka Touré's Mali blues crossed with the Wu-Tang Clan’s broken hip-Hop beats, albeit played on electric guitars and assorted percussion.
Their 2007 album “Aman Iman: Water Is Life” was nothing less than a revelation to me when I first heard it, and now that Tinariwen have released the follow-up “Imidiwan: Companions”, I’ve been quick to review it in glowing terms. In the course of my research, I discovered that the world music scene has been fawning over the band since a WOMAD appearance in 2001 and that Tinariwen have a history that spans more than two decades. So in fact I’m a late-comer to the fold. Still, that hasn’t deterred me from lauding Tinariwen for their virtues as instrumentalists and singers, as their music only gains in power and beauty on repeated listens. One can’t praise these records enough, even though many journalists have tried before me.

I CATCHER

Ironic as it may seem, it’s actually quite difficult to get music journalists to go out and see new bands or listen to albums by as-yet unknown artists. There’s a reason for that glaring contradiction, and that’s the fact that people who listen to music for a living would rather indulge their passion for artists they know and love than fill their already cramped cognitive space with sound they can neither digest comfortably nor derive fee-paying prose from.
I know we’re not the only professionals guilty of conservative crimes against the performing arts: In “Prick Up Your Ears”, his biography of Sixties playwright Joe Orton, John Lahr remarks that getting critics to attend premieres is a headache New York theatre producers have always had to contend with. The joy is all the greater when you encounter new music that instead of cluttering up your mind makes you feel richer for having stumbled upon it.
Such was the Case With “Balance Instars”, the debut album by London-based prog-metal band Of The I, who not only have a penchant for Californian avant-rock masters Tool, but also have the chops to match said band’s most complex work – plus the imagination to go beyond it, adding ambient and classical inflections to Tool’s intricate guitar lines, angular rhythms and darkly plaintive vocals.
That’s no mean feat, as Tool themselves did a near-revelatory reworking of the in itself virtuoso music of latter-day King Crimson in the Nineties. I really look forward to hearing what Of The I will do next, but it might be some time before I get to see them live. True to form and much to my shame, I managed to miss their gig in Zurich a month or two back.