For Arooj Aftab, Nighttime is the Right Time
An absorbing new album from the Pakistani-American singer conjures after-hours melancholy, sensuality, and romance.
Arooj Aftab - Night Reign
“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” sighed a weary Bob Dylan on 1997’s Time Out of Mind. Dylan spoke about encroaching shadows with a note of warning in his voice— but on a spellbinding new album called Night Reign, the singer Arooj Aftab presents them with an air of invitation.
Aftab is no stranger to nocturnal reflections and after-hours reveries. Her previous album, Vulture Prince, dwelt in the shadow of grief, drawing from a dusky aesthetic palette to process the sudden loss of her brother. Night Reign, too, has a thread of loss running through it, but here its just one emotion among many: Across these nine songs, Aftab summons all of the nighttime’s heightened sensations, including intimacy, sensuality, melancholy, and playfulness.
Befitting an album inspired by night, the songs here move at a languid, unhurried pace. And though Aftab’s compositions are not formless, exactly, they do have a kind of dreamlike, porous quality to them, drifting between moments of rhythmic and melodic clarity and moments of insomniac haze. Little sonic flourishes ring out through the dreamy swirl, grace notes rendered in vivid detail— clanging percussion in “Autumn Leaves,” grungy electric bass in “Bolo Na,” breathy woodwinds trilling through “Last Night Reprise.”
Aftab values the borderless, improvisational spirit of jazz, if not always its actual tropes. You won’t hear twinkling cocktail pianos here, nor a lot of big band horns or brushed percussion. Instead, Aftab grounds her music in a more folksy, ethereal sound, often dominated by the rustle of acoustic guitar strings, sonorous upright bass, and glistening harp. Traditional jazz instruments are often used in non-traditional ways: When vibes master Joel Ross guests on “Bolo Na” it’s not with a splashy solo, but rather with atmospheric, scene-setting ambiance.
And then there is Aftab herself, an imperious singer who favors an intimate, conspiratorial tone. Listen to how she caresses each syllable in “Na Gul,” one of several songs here based in Urdu poetry— and the closest thing to a big, stately piano ballad. Even more arresting is opener “Aey Nehin,” where her gentle delivery rides wave after wave of acoustic strings, a siren song sounding clean and true above the roar of the midnight ocean.
On the moments where she engages American jazz traditions most directly, it’s often with a playful, deconstructive bent. Anchored by the questing bass of Linda May Han Oh, Aftab’s take on “Autumn Leaves” is haunting, spectral— a naked expression of loss and longing. It ends, delightfully, with an eerie keyboard reverie from instrumentalist James Francies.
Other songs engage more directly with contemporary sounds, including hip-hop. With its rumbling low-end, “Bola Na” captures the nighttime’s alluring sense of danger, while bracing spoken-word passages from the singer-poet Moor Mother highlight Aftab’s music at its most rhythmic and percussive. On “Raat Ki Rani,” Aftab creates a hallucinatory effect by running her immaculate voice through a filter of edgeless Autotune.
What each song makes clear is that Aftab is a romantic at heart, equally enchanted by the poetic imagery of the night and by creating vibrant, sumptuous sounds. “Saaqi” is one of the most sensual pieces on the record, a lush chamber jazz piece with achingly beautiful accompaniment from Vijay Iyer, the pianist with whom Aftab collaborated on last year’s sprawling Love in Exile. “Last Night Reprise” is more lavish still, a dream made concrete through the graceful playing of Aftab’s full band. There’s even a sneaky Wurlitzer organ cameo from Elvis Costello, of all people.
Much of Night Reign is drawn from Urdu poetic traditions, where the after-hours are a fertile source of romantic imagery. You don’t have to speak the language to sense that these songs are largely concerned with union, reunion, and longing for the beloved— Aftab makes as much clear from the intimate way she caresses each word, savoring them like precious memories or half-remembered dreams.
When she does sing in English, Aftab favors an aura of mystery over dense narrative. In “Last Night Reprise,” she makes a meal out of elegant metaphor: “Last night my lover was like the moon.” Over-explanation would only ruin the song’s allure, and Aftab wisely avoids it. In “Whiskey,” she repeats a single, intimate memory: “Your head gets heavy and rests on my shoulders/ Cause you drink too much whiskey when you’re with me.”
Night Reign lingers long over such moments of love and loss, intimacy and remembrance— and from them it wrests captivating beauty. It’s another masterful flourish from Aftab, a singer and record-maker who is uniquely gifted at bringing nocturnal visions into the light of day.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10
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