PASTE MAGAZINE: The 15 Best Songs of March 2021
PASTE MAGAZINE: The 15 Best Songs of March 2021
BY SCOTT RUSSELL
“The first single from Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab’s sophomore album, Vulture Prince (April 23, New Amsterdam), “Mohabbat” is rooted in a centuries-old lyric form: the ghazal, an ancient poetic style—sometimes spoken, sometimes sung—that centers on the bittersweet interconnection of love and loss. Aftab here performs Hafeez Hoshiarpuri’s famed ghazal “Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge” (from Urdu, roughly, “There is no shortage of love”), following in the footsteps of Pakistani singers including Medhi Hassan and Iqbal Bano (as Vrinda Jagota points out in Pitchfork). Aftab’s rich, fingerpicked acoustic guitars are the song’s guiding force, while her fluid vocals convey an aching longing that transcends language, and what sounds like an electronic tabla undergirds it all. As “Mohabbat” wanders, distant horns and synths make their presence felt, like landmarks here and there beside the path; rather than heightening the song’s tension as it builds, only to release it, Aftab opts for a more complicated structure, as if the song is part of something so large, we can’t experience it all at once. And it is, isn’t it?”