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The title of Aziza Brahim’s new album, Mawja, is richly polysemic. In the Hassaniya Arabic of the south-western Maghreb — including the singer-songwriter’s homeland of the Western Sahara — the word means wave. Here it refers to the images of sand dunes piled up like waves that reccur throughout the songs; the medium- and long-wave radio stations that brought music from abroad into her life as a teenager; the literal waves of the Atlantic, which she crossed to study in Cuba, and the Mediterranean, which separates north Africa from her new home in Barcelona.
All these influences and more can be heard in the album, which comes after a difficult pandemic, renewed fighting between the Western Sahara and Morocco and the loss of her grandmother, a Sahrawi poet. Her memory is captured on several songs. “Rest in peace”, she sings in “Duaa” with a yearning lament of a melody, “she was known for her kindness.” A flute keens over a beautiful repeated guitar figure. “Give her holy water to drink in Paradise.” Later, “Ljaima Likbira” recalls the “big haima” of her grandparents amid percussion and choppy guitar licks. Brahim remembers “magnanimity” and “courage . . . the land of poets” as ululations resound with a thrill.
Some of that poetry rings through “Bubisher”, a fable about a mythical bird that takes flight on a sprightly bassline from Guillem Aguilar. There is a hint of reggae in the rhythm of “Marhabna 2.1” — a revisiting of a song from Brahim’s 2014 album Soutak — as she sings a welcome to visiting strangers.
Before the recording of “Metal, Madera” she made her drummer, Andreu Moreno, listen to The Clash, and the song stands out, although it is more of a bluesy thump than a clone of Sandinista!. On the title track, Cuban rhythms blow in from the west as Brahim issues a call to “turn up the volume of the secret wave.” The guitar sways and circles in and out. Percussion tinkles like Morse Code. “Dance the melody of joy and music/because it is the source of our wishes and the truth.”
★★★★☆
‘Mawja’ is released by Glitterbeat
