Album Review: Amadou & Mariam - Folila

How's your Bambara? That's not a personal question, I'm talking linguistics. For those not at a conversational level, Amadou & Mariam also deliver their upbeat West African pop in Dogon, Prul, Bamanan, French and English. On Folila though, as on their previous albums, the loudest voice is the joy that permeates from start to finish.

Having caught the attention of some big names through their previous tours and releases, they are now in a position to pick and choose who they work with. This is Amadou & Mariam's 'collaboration' album, the Malian couple hosting a range of talent including Amp Fiddler, Ebony Bones and Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears. The result isn't the musical soup that it might have been, although in comparison with previous albums Dimanche a Bamako and Welcome To Mali there is certainly a change in the sonic landscape. The influence of the various contributors never comes close to overwhelming Amadou & Mariam's own style of Afropop though, and a crude but workable analogy would be to compare Folila to Paul Simon's Graceland, heard through a reverse filter.

'World music' is often caricatured as earnest, worthy and occasionally, if unfairly, dull. So where does Folila fit into this? The answer is none of the above. The album is relentlessly upbeat and enjoyable, tempered only occasionally by the feeling that the supporting artists get a little more out of the collaborations, in the way of cred points, than the veteran troubadours get in musical input. Given the quality of those contributors, this is testament to the magnetism of Amadou & Mariam's sound and influence.