Arooj Aftab is a lot of fun live. She has a tremendous voice and one that really benefits from a live stage. Her voice is incredibly rich and her Urdu music showcases it well. Additionally, she is both irreverent and hilarious and her crowd interactions are a highlight in themselves and a great counterpoint to a music that is often played too seriously.
The rest of the band does a great job laying soundscapes around her. It’s a textured sound and it evolves well over the course of each song. There’s an expert balance between the vocals and the instruments that allows the listener to move between the two smoothly. This led to a few cases where some of the instrumental solos felt like they had a hole the vocals could have filled but the excellent chemistry between the violin and guitar led to plenty of fun and an interesting new dimension to the sound.
When you put everything together, the total made for a wonderful show. There was more folksiness in both the English and Urdu songs than I expected and much more humor in the performance than I could have asked for. It’s hard to think of how this could have been more enjoyable than it was.
Top Five Records 
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