Tinariwen played Friday night at the 9:30 Club. Photo from artist website.

The Tinariwen backstory is the stuff of legends. Tuareg refugees from Mali living across the border in the desert of Libya, they were recruited to serve in Muammar Ghaddafi’s army of the Sahara. They met during military training, and began working out a blend of North and West African music through jams of traditional songs and tunes about the plight of the Tuareg people and their way of life in the Sahara.

Over the past ten years, their international notoriety has grown by leaps and bounds, buoyed by a 2001 headlining set at the Festival in the Desert in northern Mali. In the past few years, write-ups in the New York Times and Rolling Stone have brought a little more attention in the United States, and their third LP, Aman Iman (“Water is Life”) seemed like the hip namedrop of 2007. For good reason: group founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib had this weird tinny, deceptively simple guitar sound that came off as a sort of Tuareg Neil Young, getting more out of pure feel than anything technically brilliant.

On Friday night at the 9:30 Club though, there was plenty of carefully crafted musicianship to match the group’s emotive call-and-response vocals — which are all in Tamashek, by the way — and their loping hand-drum beats. Slower numbers like “Assouf” had a darker, bluesy edge, more about the deliberate pulse of the drums and the echoing vocals.