Night Reign
By Arooj Aftab
One of the most musically beguiling artists of recent years has been Arooj Aftab. Born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, after teenage years in Lahore, she’s now based in Brooklyn and connected to a global village of artists and collaborators, such as sitar player Anoushka Shankar, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily (who shared billing on her last album, Love in Exile).
As on her breakthrough album, Vulture Prince (2021), Aftab’s vocals floated between the ethereally hypnotic and transporting meditative states.
But Night Reign – her third album in as many years – has a more earthy quality in places. This is noticeable in the stealthy menace of Bolo Na, with Black American poet Moor Mother, and Whiskey, which – despite the trickle of harp and intimate, dreamy mood – is about a night on the tiles with a lover.
These are some way from the transcendent states of those two previous albums, although that elevated, enigmatic beauty is also here on the hymnal Na Gul, the slowly measured Saaqi (with Iyer) and Zameen.There’s a teased-out treatment of the Rumi poem Last Night, which featured on Vulture Prince, with Scottish harp player Maeve Gilchrist and guitarists Kaki King and Cautious Clay.
Somewhere between night-owl jazz, slow-burning world music and a seduction, Night Reign occupies its own spiritual sphere where even her version of the standard Autumn Leaves, with keyboard player James Francies, sounds like a companion piece to Last Night: mysterious, otherworldly and floating in warm suspension. That’s three in a row from Arooj Aftab.
News of the Universe
By La Luz
The journey and offshoots of this Seattle band have been worth following as they moved from twanging surf guitar and girl group rock’n’roll roots on their 2013 debut It’s Alive through line-up changes and to more mainstream post-punk pop and dreamy ballads. Those shifts and broadening of their style have been prompted by the parallel solo career of the group’s only remaining original member, Shana Cleveland, a poet and visual artist whose Manzanita album we noted last year was “a beguiling marriage of timeless, elegant folk and wispily delivered insight” (Listener, April 1, 2023).
Motherhood, treatment for breast cancer and moving to the country had changed her, and some of Manzanita’s gentle influence is apparent on their fifth studio album News of the Universe, which explores acceptance on the Beatlesque Poppies: “I thought I’d disappear under the weight of troubles … and now across the field the poppies come again.” Here, too, are simple sentiments delivered without irony (Always in Love, the deliberately naive I’ll Go With You) alongside the fuzz-box guitar and relentless groove of Strange World, wired up dream pop of Dandelions, the glistening instrumental Close Your Eyes and the organ-psychedelics of Good Luck With Your Secret (very 1968).
Some of these 12 tracks seem slight but, like The Courtneys and the shamelessly enjoyable The Aquadolls, La Luz tap just enough retro-rock and folk-pop over the duration that their unassuming personality comes through.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
