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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > June > 20 > Entry
CD review: ‘Fondo’ by Vieux Farka Toure
Vieux Farka Toure
“Fondo”
(Six Degree Records)
B
Every impulse of Mali’s pop music scene moves towards a new sound: one that mixes the nation’s ancient musical traditions with a cutting-edge sensibility affected but in no way dominated by Western influences.
It’s in that context that Vieux Farka Toure’s second album, “Fondo,” arrives.
This is the first disc featuring songs written almost exclusively by the son of the late, great legend Ali Farka Toure, and the highly awaited album succeeds on a couple different levels.
The focused production by Toure and Israeli bassist/producer Yossi Fine keeps the strands of an ambitious, wide-ranging project tied tightly together. Aggressive percussion is strapped in the background behind droning guitar lines often drenched in reverb, with Toure’s signature Jazz Chorus-amplified lead lines blazing over top.
The consistency allows the startling diversity of “Fondo” plenty of breathing room. Toure moves well beyond the bounds of the “desert blues” pioneered by his father.
Soul-infused rhythms set the stage for ringing pull-off lead lines in the opening track “Fafa.”
In “Ai Haira,” a thick rumba and low-register droning guitar line propel Toure’s lead guitar.
The record picks up momentum with “Souba Souba,” which begins as a brooding, cyclical blues number that would feel equally at home deep in the delta or the desert, and leads to the spare, exultant chant that gives the track its name.
“Sarama’s” aggressively layered percussion achieves the fullness of a house beat without the aid or artificial stamp of electronics, and “Wale” filters a Malian traditional through the desert blues.
But the album shows its conceptual underpinnings most clearly in the aptly named “Mali.” Singer Afel Bocoum, a onetime collaborator of Ali Farka Toure’s, sings along with Vieux. In the meantime, psychedelic, Hendrix-evolved electric guitar lines contrast with the rapid-fire strains of the ‘ngoni, a small but powerful West African stringed instrument.
The album’s strength, however, is also the source of its shortcomings.
The production is a little too tight at times, too restrained to allow the sheer power of Toure’s live performances to come alive. The exuberant “Cherie Le” comes close, but in the end misses the opportunity to allow Toure’s considerable guitar chops fully to the forefront. The dub-inspired “Diaraby Magni,” probably the album’s best just-plain-fun track, still feels like it’s holding back.
What “Fondo” achieves is a convincing portrait of a young musician with a deep pedigree and experimental fearlessness. It is an impressive breakthrough album to be sure, but more than anything feels like a promise of greater things yet to come.
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