The Best Show on WFMU and the Tuareg Guitar Revolution!!!!

I have too many mp3s. I'm not doing anything drastic like deleting anything. But I have TOO many mp3s. Yes, many are torrented and many are downloaded from sites like these. I have a subscription with emusic--50 mp3 downloads a month. Bands that I obsess over I try to support that still have available product, such as The Sound, For Against, The Chameleons. (I promise to go more into my post-punk obsession in the future.) I also buy bands that are associated with the Best Show on WFMU. I'm not totally into all the stuff he (Tom Scharpling) plays. But he plays a pretty diverse array of stuff that rocks. I found the Bingo Trappers, Reigning Sound, Black Lips and some other garage-punk that I hadn't really been into before. He also has a profound knowledge of classic rock, and is a convincing advocate of Paul McCartney's solo work, and always throws in some killer psych-rock. (It is really quite amazing how much amazing psych-rock there is.) I also have been buying Ted Leo and Pharmacist albums--and I like them, even though I hated them at first. But he is a friend of Tom Scharpling, and all around cool dude who works his ass off to make incredible dense, hook-heavy punkitude rock.

Scharpling directed Ted Leo's latest video. It's a funny send-up of the Green Day musical:

Ted Leo And The Pharmacists - "Bottled In Cork" (Official Video) from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

And I recently actually ordered some actually physical product, both from Merge Records: The new Superchunk record, and the three CD retrospective of Big Dipper. Both are Best Show related. Tom Scharpling set the wheels in motion to get the Big Dipper set out, and his comedic cohort Jon Wurster is the drummer for Superchunk (as well as for The Mountain Goats.) I haven't even listened to them yet. I don't even know if I like Superchunk. But I've developed a personal relationship with some of these guys. {Sort of, I mean, they don't know who I am really, but I post on the forums and they are my facebook "friends." [Facebook is really great for stalking minor celebrities. (hint-hint, K)]}

Which of course has nothing to do with my inspiration for today's post. I may have tens of thousands of mp3s, but I really haven't been excited enough to listen to an album over and over again since my encounter with Group Inerane.

I found the album on the excellent blog exp etc, via a google buzz alert from Gary.

The description of the band makes it sound too good to be true:

Group Inerane is the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution sweeping across the Sahara Desert and inspired by the rebel musicians that started this music as a political weapon used to communicate from the Libyan Refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. Spearheaded by the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed, Group Inerane has been together for several years and carries the rich tradition of Tamachek guitar songs for another generation. These ten tracks are a combination of amplified roots rock, blues, and folk in the local Tuareg styles at times entering into full-on electric guitar psychedelia.

It's an electric African psychedelic drone-rock blues. My God, man. My God.