Often an album sounds distinctly influenced by a certain artist, by a place the songs’ writer has been, by the environment in which the music was written or recorded. Occasionally, these kinds of influencing factors come together in such a crystalline way that it can be said that a set of recordings was actually inspired by a specific event. It is the 2008 Festival of the Desert which looms over Dirtmusic’s second album BKO, which is named after the acronym used to refer to Bamako airport in Mali, the country in which the Festival of the Desert takes place. Comprising Hugo Race (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds among others), Chris Eckman (of The Walkabouts) and Chris Brokaw (formerly of Codeine), Dirtmusic were profoundly influenced by their experiences in Mali.

BKO sounds like an honest document of those experiences; to my imagination, it aptly captures the hazy desert heat, the laid-back and near-endless jams. Given that the band members apparently jammed at length with Touareg band Tamikrest during the festival, it may not be surprising that a tolerance for essentially drone-based music is something of a requirement for enjoying these recordings, on which Tamikrest played a substantial part. Indeed, the problem with BKO is that like desert heat, it has a potential to be somewhat oppressive. Multiple songs well in excess of five or six minutes heavily dependent on a repetitive drone and allied to less-than-exciting vocal performances can mean that BKO has the potential to drag. It is telling that a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and the instrumental “Niger Sundown” are among the record’s most enjoyable sections. Dirtmusic’s songwriting could be stronger.

However despite these shortcomings, BKO remains a substantial and intriguing listening experience not only because it arguably succeeds in capturing the kind of dusty atmosphere in which it was conceived, but also because it represents a success of sorts in Dirtmusic’s experiment with returning to a determinedly stripped-down, back-to-basics rock sound. BKO may be a little challenging at times, and it could perhaps have used some extra time to really polish the songs and to draw more dynamism and less repetition from them, but it is anything but inauthentic.