A slightly tenuous connection, but it’s odd to think that, when the record I blogged about yesterday, “Brighten The Corners”, first came out, Damon Albarn was at the height of his Pavement phase. I remember going to see Pavement in Oxford on that tour (“Westie Can Drum”, “The Killing Moon”. . .) and Albarn was there with Justine Frischmann, looking conspicuously inconspicuous in a baseball cap pulled down low. Nowadays, of course, Albarn’s public enthusiasms are directed much more towards the likes of Amadou & Mariam, the blind Malian couple who have become, I suspect, one of African music’s most lucrative exports in the past few years. If 2005’s “Dimanche A Bamako” was a kind of slick, syncopated hybrid of Malian music, R&B and Francophone global pop – as represented by producer Manu Chao (whose own records I can’t deal with, incidentally; all a bit Eurovision Mescaleros for me) – then “Welcome To Mali” introduces the Albarn-endorsed world of Africa Express to the party, too. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that Amadou & Mariam have invited all those dubious UK indie sloggers that seem to crop up on Africa Express bills like Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly, Reverend And The Makers, Hard-Fi, and so on – though perhaps we should give these bands credit for having the guts to jam with people like Toumani Diabaté. Maybe some more illustrious Western names are too scared, one way or the other? It does mean, though, that Damon Albarn himself turns up on this hectic, long, generally euphoric record. For the most part, it’s pretty exhilarating stuff, with all the disparate sounds and influences meticulously crafted into a coherent, if frantic, musical expression of joy. On “Batoman” and “Sebeke” in particular, it feels like producers Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais are throwing multiple digitally-rendered kitchen sinks into the mix, but the spirit of Amadou and Mariam just about emerges intact – even, on “Sebeke”, when it comes filtered through a vocoder. The whole album is spattered with great moments of fusion: the seething R&B Hammond runs in “Compagnon De La Vie”; the euphoric blues-rock solo that Amadou unleashes in the midst of the particularly lively “Masiteladi” (this one helmed by Vanessa Paradis’ mentor, M); the mighty face-off between Amadou and Toumani Diabaté’s kora on “Djuru”. Only one contributor really grates: the Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan, an Africa Express regular whose own records and gigs have left me more irritated than impressed, contributes some lame rhymes to “Africa”. It is Albarn, predictably, whose contribution will get most publicity. “Sabali” opens the album, plants Mariam’s voice into a chintzy synthscape very close in tone to his Olympics theme, and doesn’t feature Amadou at all. Audacious and pretty, perhaps, but the muso in me can’t help thinking that it’s a bit of waste of such a fantastic guitarist. And that thought, to be honest, recurs intermittently throughout the rest of the record. There’s so much going on here, so much technoflash and delirium, that those serpentine, unravelling riffs aren’t anywhere near as prominent as I’d like. I was writing a review of this record last night, and I was trying to pithily express how there seems to have been a paradigm shift in the tastes of African music fans of late: that where they once fetishised purity and authenticity, now fusion is seen as something desirable, rather than a sell-out. “Welcome To Mali” and Africa Express are clearly manifestations of this, and clearly good things in general; as I’ve said before here many times, I always think the pursuit of authenticity, realism or whatever in music is a bit bogus, or at least a waste of time. But for all the pleasures of “Welcome To Mali”, it strikes me that its hi-tech polish occasionally smothers the character and charm of Amadou & Mariam themselves. Then this morning I realised that, by worrying about this, I wasn’t actually bemoaning a lack of authenticity or whatever in their music. It was simply a question of production techniques – after all, Amadou & Mariam were playing a distinct fusion of Malian forms and Western R&B long before they were picked up by Western music biz grandees. “Welcome To Mali” is a shiny pop record, very now, very likely to date, very good fun. But maybe it’s my rockist, indie-boy aesthetics that lead me to prefer the Malian likes of Tinariwen; another fusion between local Saharan music and rock, of course, but one which is less gilded, more psychedelic perhaps, which lets the music breathe a little more. There’s plenty on “Welcome To Mali” which is dazzling, but I wonder how Amadou & Mariam would sound if they’d fallen in with, say, the Robert Plant crowd rather than the Manu Chao scene in the first place? And while we’re on this subject, can I briefly recommend a record by Terakaft called “Akh Issudar”? It’s a Tinariwen spin-off, very much in the same vein, and it’s terrific.

When promos of the latest deluxe Pavement reissue – “Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed”, no less – turned up last week, it struck me that perhaps, in 12 months’ time, we might just be talking about a Pavement comeback being one of the key reunions of 2009. For in spite of vague (presumably) unresolved animosities, ongoing careers (Malkmus’ “Real Emotional Trash” remains one of my 2008 favourites; doesn’t Bob Nastanovich do something involving racehorses full-time now in Louisville?) and so on, there feels like something inevitable about them getting back together sooner or later. Not least, I suppose, because various ex-members of the band have alluded to it happening, perhaps with the sort of droll, apparently powerless phlegmatism that was always one of Pavement’s key assets. They’re still one of my favourite bands, though one I only interviewed once: a farcical night in Leeds that involved me clumsily annoying a raft of fanzine writers, Sonic Youth and, eventually, quite a few of Pavement – apart from Gary Young who, on his last tour with the band I think, was doing a good job of annoying his bandmates himself. If I remember right, that day he’d put a dead rabbit in Malkmus’ luggage, and spent most of the evening handing tiddlywinks out to audience members in the foyer of the venue. I digress. Anyway, listening to “Brighten The Corners”, I’m reminded just how much I love Pavement, not least because this one has always been perhaps my least-favourite of their albums, and it still sounds terrific. In contrast with some of the chaotic things that came before it, and the intensively divisive Malkmus/Godrich business surrounding “Terror Twilight” that followed, “Brighten The Corners” sounds like the calmest album in Pavement’s canon. It’s here, maybe, that they started tentatively grappling with the idea of a sort of maturity, where the concepts of lo-fi or whatever that loitered around them became less pressing. Great songs, then – “We Are Underused”! “Stereo”!, “Starlings Of The Slipstream”!. The first stirrings of Malkmus’ nascent guitar hero instincts – check out the grand coda to “Type Slowly”, which might be my favourite thing here. Endless quotable lines, beginning of course with all that stuff about Geddy Lee in “Stereo”. And a more integrated Scott Kannberg, who still managed to have maybe one of his very best songs – “Winner Of The” – left off the actual album. “Winner Of The” is, of course, included here as one of 30-odd extra tracks; nothing less than we’ve come to expect from these hefty reissues of the Pavement catalogue that roll out once every couple of years. Picking a way through it all, there’s an argument that this might actually be one of the richest Pavement periods, given the quality of all these b-sides and offcuts. On Disc One, for instance, there’s a great, tentative, generally instrumental version of “The Hexx” that flourishes without the Godrich wooshing it received on “Terror Twilight”. There are more great offcuts (“Harness Your Hopes” and “Roll With The Wind”) that originally limped out a few years too late as b-sides to “Spit On A Stranger”. And there’s one of my favourite Pavement songs of all, “Westie Can Drum”, a seemingly jokey prelude to the sniping which would eat away at the band during the “Terror Twilight” sessions. Disc Two begins with a racey version of “Type Slowly”, “Slowly Typed”, and wanders through a bunch of revealing and fun cover versions (of which “The Killing Moon” is the most familiar, but there’s also The Fall’s “The Classical”, and a punt at Faust’s “It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” which I’ve never come across before). There’s also an unreleased song called “Neil Hegarty Meets Jon Spencer In A Non-Alcoholic Bar”, the title of which has bewitched me so completely that, every time I’ved played the album thus far, I’ve failed to notice what it’s actually like. A lot to take in here; I’ll play it all again, and get back to you. . .