Arooj Aftab, Glasgow review: 'hit a melancholy sweet spot'

Arooj Aftab | Rob Kim/Getty Images

Arooj Aftab, QMU, Glasgow ★★★★

Contrary to the sorrowful, spellbinding impression created by her music, Brooklyn-based singer Arooj Aftab is a hoot and appeared determined to make the most of her arrival in Glasgow on a Saturday night, calling for malt whiskies all round, or at least for a select few drouthy folks in the front rows.

Her songs, she claimed, were actually about “the patheticisms of love” but Aftab made her Urdu lyrics sound like divine utterances or yearning invocations.

Her gift is in taking the listener to a melancholy sweet spot where she can soothe with her intuitively modulated husky alto voice. She was supported in her mesmeric musical language by a band of jazzy “bad cats” Petros Kamplanis on double bass, Darian Donovan Thomas on violin and Gyan Riley on acoustic guitar, whose dexterous flourishes were often greeted like Jimmy Page solos.

Aftab hailed her new album Night Reign as “edgy and fun” and its Grammy-winning predecessor Vulture Prince as “sad and depressing”, concluding “it's gonna be a mess tonight”. In practice, the contrasts were not so stark, though there was no mistaking the sentiment of Aftab’s English language songs. “You drink too much whiskey when you're with me” she proclaimed on Whiskey, an ode to lost hours in Brooklyn with a remarkable ringing guitar break. Right on cue, the malts arrived.

Next on her nocturnal odyssey, a paean to the unfulfilled potential of eyes locking across a room which did, indeed, sound very alluring. The sexual tension was broken as the set moved on to the prettiest gentle guitar and soulful fluttering violin combo from Riley and Thomas while Kamplanis’s bass intimated a clubby funkiness.

Mostly, though, this was musical immersion of a different mood, luxurious meditations greeted with ecstasy and, on encore number Mohabbat, voice and distorted instruments in transcendental synergy.