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HOT OFF THE PRESS (#23) - Amadou & Mariam and Team B
It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first glance at music discovered in the last seven days, whether it be just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of Hot Off the Press, featuring acts such as Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Crystal Stilts, White Denim, and Grizzly Bear.
Amadou & Mariam – 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.
Listen to music by Amadou & Mariam here
Team B – Team B
self-released this December
Report Card: C+
It seems like a bad idea to acknowledge to a potential significant other, right up front, that you are, in fact, the backup and not the starter—after all, shouldn’t you let your personality pave the way for you, and not your second-bestness? But Team B didn’t allow their sometimes charming nature to act as a bridge into the band, instead labeling themselves effectively subordinate as the second stringers, Team B’s lineup of bit players from Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and Beirut besides. But hey, at least they didn’t name the album Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Beirut, and Broken Social Scene Present Team B. That would have just been too much.
But for what it is, Team B’s music oscillates between the gentle and satisfying and the unfortunately mundane and juvenile. The album starts off well enough, and with a very welcome subtlety that belies the band members’ involvement in so many big noise acts. While this subtlety continues for the most part throughout the collection, a general unevenness of approach makes this seem less like a cohesive effort and more like a bunch of spare parts, with only Team B captain Kelly Pratt holding it together with his vocals. And as far as juvenilia is concerned, third track “Tons of Fun” would be great if he weren’t singing about what he’s singing about: “I don’t care what the other dudes say, ‘cuz my girl blows the competition away, now she may not be the fittest of the fit, but it’s nice to know she’ll never do any better than me…she’s tons of fun.” And the album is rife with these sorts of eyebrow-raising clevernesses, and the fact that “Tons of Fun” is one of the album’s best songs is indicative of a bigger problem—that, really, this is Team B, and there’s a reason why it’s not Team A.
Listen to music by Team B here