Review: Night Reign By Arooj Aftab

Sunday, 16 June 2024, 6:10 pm
Article: RNZ

Tony Stamp, Music Content Producer | From The Sampler

Vulture Prince, the third album by Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab, was a minor sensation, garnering breathless praise from critics worldwide. And with good reason: it merged disparate influences seamlessly, and made sounds that may have been new to Western audiences seem familiar.

More than that, it’s an extremely easy listen. Despite being inspired by, and dedicated to, her late brother, and consequently undercut by tragedy, Aftab’s voice has rare warmth, and her taste in arrangements aims to soothe.

That’s still the case on followup Night Reign, an album that broadens her musical palette; somewhat more urgent, and just as inviting.

Although she composed most of the music, only three songs on Night Reign feature lyrics by Aftab. For the rest she continued a mode begun on Vulture Prince, adapting the work of Pakistani and Indian poets.

Here that includes two by 18th century Urdu poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. In an interview with The Fader, Aftab says she felt a “nagging sense of connection to her”, as Chanda was the first female from South Asia to publish poetry in Urdu.

In that interview you get a sense of the reverence she has for the original work, and the amount of time spent coming to grips with it. As she says “You can’t just compose somebody’s poems if you don’t have a sense of who they are”.

Effort was made to have the music sound as royal and stately as the words required, resulting in tracks like the tranquil ‘Saaqi’.

Aftab has gathered a wider range of collaborators around her for this release, including returning harpist Maeve Gilchrist, who, along with upright bassist Petros Klampanis, provide the album’s most definitive sounds (outside Aftab's voice). There’s also everything from flute, and violin, to tuba, although honestly these take a while to register, somewhat backgrounded due to the singer’s commitment to minimalism.

She’ll also happily switch things up on tracks like ‘Bolo Na’, with its brushed drums and electric bass, and a guest who, in practice, makes perfect sense: the jazz-adjacent poet Moor Mother.

Although Aftab presents herself as a student of past poets, it’s a mistake to think she relies on them. In that Fader interview she mentions Moor Mother, saying, “her pen is so strong. She can articulate a thing like a knife covered in honey.”

So clearly Aftab is good with words, too. Late in the album comes one track she wrote in English, called ‘Whiskey’, with lines like “I think I'm ready to give into your beauty/ And let you fall in love with me”. It’s a song that shies away from Pakistani folk influences, and even jazz, in favour of a swooping, pop-tinged chorus.

For the past ten years Arooj Aftab has lived in New York, so it makes sense that her music would encompass several cultures at once. It does feel slightly jarring to see a YouTube clip of her palling around with Penn Badgley, star of the Netflix show You, or clock that Marvel movie star Tessa Thompson directed one of her music videos, or spot none other than Elvis Costello in the credits for Night Reign.

He pops up playing wurlitzer on ‘Last Night Reprise’, a continuation and reworking of a track that appeared on Vulture Prince. There’s also a version of the jazz standard ‘Autumn Leaves’.

Despite the numerous adaptations of other pieces of work, though, Aftab emerges feeling fiercely unique.

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