The Morning After: Amadou & Mariam's Welcome to Mali

Welcome to Mali, released December 16 on Because UK

Report Card: A

This isn’t the type of thing that’s going to get every smirking college student buying into the hype, with its amalgam of funk grooves, big-ass instrumentation, and a distinct lack of lyrics you can sensibly sing along to, but that’s not to say that every smirking college student has impeccable taste. After all, Amadou and Mariam have been around the block with this music thing for about thirty years, and Welcome to Mali represents not an unaware headfirst dive into West African experimentation but rather the embodiment of a lifetime of refinement. Think The Rolling Stones if only The Rolling Stones were still making music anyone wanted to hear.

While for their last album Dimanche A Bamako—in many ways their international coming out party—they employed Manu Chao as producer and collaborator, this time around the long-time African icons enlisted the UK’s everpresent superman, Damon Albarn (of Blur, Gorillaz, and The Good, The Bad, & The Queen fame, among numerous other projects) to produce their music, and his sure hand prepped the duo and their sprawling ensemble for widespread Western consumption. Driving the music is the couple’s distinct vocal work and Amadou’s chugging guitar, and Welcome to Mali is a bounty of great songs that grow on you the more you listen to them. Standouts such as the stunning Amadou-fronted “Bozos”—a choral-backed delight of horn, piano, and guitar—and first single and Mariam-led dancefloor-ready “Sabali” make this an album that maybe, just maybe, may dig further into the American consciousness than merely the NPR crowd. Well, probably not…but add in the fact that both Amadou and Mariam, who have been married for twenty-eight years, are blind, and then their story becomes all the more fascinating, providing even greater credit to what is, in and of itself, a very, very good album.