The Touareg blues, as Terakaft calls it — others have dubbed it desert blues, which rolls off the tongue a bit easier — sounds remarkably like American country music. The conscious twang of the electric guitars — and there are lots of guitars, always played clean (no distortion, no reverb) — combined with the stuttered, Arab gait reminds me of a distant cousin to the gorgeous bluegrass ballads that crossed over to become country music. This isn't to say that you could blast this on the PA before a Toby Keith concert, but in terms of Western music, country makes for a far closer corollary than, say, rock & roll.

Akh issudar is, by coffeehouse "world music" standards, an extremely forceful, even aggressive, album. By any other standard, though, the album is introspective and meditative; "Amidine wa dagh nohar timtar" feels like it's submerged in water, its soft, palm-mute rhythm and drifting chords the soft ripples of a languid afternoon in paradise. And "Tenere wer tat zinchegh," the song that first drew me in, has a hyper-confident strut, but in a very contemplative way. If it's possible to be boastful about the soundness of one's mental state, this is it.

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