SAN FRANCISCO--In February of this year, Rolling Stone ran a cover story under the banner of The New Guitar Gods, seeking to tab Derek Trucks, John Frusciante, and John Mayer as the leaders of the new school of axe men.

But at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre Sunday night, two groups that are well outside of the venerable rock mag's purview put on a show that offered up the Sahara desert as a guitar Mecca, one that didn't conjure images of Mayer's O-face or masturbatory guitar solos.

Tinariwen and Vieux Farka Toure both come from the northern part of Mali in West Africa, and both mix traditional music from their homeland with Western rock and blues influences. The result is an African blues that can be both trance-inducing and spine-tingling.

Toure is the son of the legendary guitarist and singer Ali Farka Toure, who passed away in March 2006 amidst widespread acclaim as one of his country's greatest ambassadors. With a heralded, self-titled debut album and a subsequent remix album garnering attention internationally, Vieux Farka Toure proved worthy of the hype Sunday night, showing off deft guitar playing and loads of vocal range in his 40-minute opening set.

Tinariwen is a group formed out of Muammar al-Gaddafi's Libyan guerilla training camps in the 1980s, having literally laid down arms and picked up guitars.

The music can be a bit mystifying at first, as the quintet wears traditional Tuareg dress and head wraps, but delivers a sound that is very much electric. As many as three electric guitarists played sinewy licks at a time, and they even mixed in some hip-hop.

Both groups suffered from the language barrier, as their attempts to solicit sing-alongs in French largely fell on deaf ears. But neither band seemed flustered by it. And both bands focused on what they did best: dynamite blues-based music that managed to sound both otherworldly and earthy at the same time.

Check out an interview and full album stream for both Tinariwen and Vieux Farka Toure here, and here, respectively.