The Sampler: Nabihah Iqbal, Tom Lark, Feist

Tony Stamp reviews poetic British post-punk, local space-folk, and the return of a Canadian great.

Dreamer by Nabihah Iqbal

In 2018, an editorial ran in Dazed magazine with the title 'My name is Nabihah Iqbal, and I make guitar music'. In it, the then-30-year-old musician reflected on the response to her album, Weighing of the Heart, which was the first time she’d released music under her own name.

Iqbal was born to two British-Pakistani parents in London, and in the article says the response to foregrounding her heritage was overwhelmingly positive, with a few exceptions.

A review in XLR8R had described her sound as “very white” and not like “the Asian-British experience that we are usually given”, and Iqbal, who’d grown up idolising Oasis, took umbrage, penning the Dazed piece in response.

She’s just released a follow-up, and while I understand the motivation behind that response, it sells her somewhat short. Iqbal does make guitar music, but as her new album Dreamer proves, she does a lot more besides that. Some tracks don’t feature the six-string at all.

Iqbal’s path to full-time music was atypical - she was a lawyer working in human rights, while also DJing parties and posting her own tracks to Soundcloud, which led to German DJ Kassem Mosse signing her to his label. Around the same time, she started a show on NTS radio, which draws on her undergraduate studies in Ethnomusicology.

She was releasing electronic music under the name Throwing Shade, which was largely instrumental. The aesthetic mostly continued after the name change, with a few more live instruments, and more of her voice, sometimes singing, often speaking.

In her teens, Iqbal got into punk, embracing bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth as well as fellow Brits The Smiths and The Cure. That specific thread of Gothic, melodic post-punk looms large on Dreamer - especially its poppiest song, a melodramatic barnstormer called ‘This World Couldn’t See Us’.

Dreamer is an album with a fantastic, dramatic backstory. In 2020 Iqbal’s studio was burgled, and she lost an entire album. The next day, she received a call from her Grandmother in Pakistan, saying her grandfather had been hospitalised following a brain haemorrhage.

She flew there with her mum to be with the family, and her grandfather eventually recovered, but by that stage, travel restrictions had kicked in, and they had to stay for two months. It was her grandfather who told her to stop mourning the lost album and make a new one.

After returning to England she wrote in the countryside, and the resulting album runs the gamut from ‘Lilac Twilight’, which hovers around a single guitar chord, to ‘Sky River’, a vocal-free dance track, to the woozy synthscape of ‘Sweet Emotion’.

Music aside, Nabihah Iqbal is a fascinating character, curating the multi-arts event Brighton Festival, holding a black belt in karate, and a Masters in South African history. There’s a temptation to lump her in with the crop of UK acts who’ve brought spoken word to the fore, but she sets herself apart from Dry Cleaning, or even Kae Tempest, by being even more earnest, and less literal, than any of them.

In interviews, she’ll cite poets like William Blake and Keats, or the painter Henri Rousseau as direct influences on her work. Listen closely to this assortment of beats, reverb and bundles of words, and you might hear what she means.

Brave Star by Tom Lark

In February this year, local pop musician Shannon Matthew Vanya released his second EP, following a debut in 2020, and while doing press for it, casually mentioned he’d soon be returning to an earlier pseudonym - Tom Lark.

He hadn’t released anything under that name since 2015, but his muse was leading him back toward guitar-based music. Going by press photos, he’d also focused on growing his hair, which now hangs well below the shoulders after looking tidily cropped just a few years earlier.

And Brave Star - the debut Tom Lark full length - is the work of a well-rounded songwriter, as comfortable in the pop realm as he is crafting country-inflected folk-rock tunes, casual and confessional in equal measure.

Tom Lark (real name Shannon Fowler), has described this record as psychedelic folk, or space folk, and that feels accurate, but his pop nous is intact.

He told Under the Radar he wanted to write about things that scared him, and imagined himself as a character in a Spaghetti Western while doing so, enjoying the irony of a tough archetype struggling to confront his inner feelings.

Fowler’s voice has a natural vulnerability, and amiability, which means things never get too angsty. And despite the cowboy character, this isn't a country album, although its influence is felt on songs like ‘Live Wires’.

In that same interview, Fowler mentions a few Tom Lark albums that were never released, around ten years ago. He began learning how to produce pop songs in an effort to do something totally different and helped friends make tracks in the genre, which eventually led to the Shannon Matthew Vanya project.

Tom Lark’s sound is a return to acoustic guitars and live drums, and this never sounds like a musician outside their comfort zone. There’s a real sense of focus, possibly helped by the process of making the album, which he recorded completely himself during lockdown.

Emphasis is on melody and harmony, but those psychedelic elements he mentioned surface around the edges, like a burst of noise before the chorus on ‘Soft Serve’.

The last Shannon Matthew Vanya EP featured a co-writing credit from the Phoenix Foundation’s Sam Scott, which struck me as an intriguing match, but after hearing this album, it makes perfect sense. The open-skies songwriting of that band, home to other exponents like Lawrence Arabia, is the area Tom Lark is pitching his tent.

The title track ‘Brave Star’ is a diminutive epic that includes various synth burbles alongside slide guitar, his voice growing more yearning as it goes up an octave in the chorus, and even some unexpected crowd applause.

There are moments on the album when Tom Lark deliberately shrinks the margins of his music down to something more modest, in songs that ground him in this country’s pantheon of bedroom pop artists.

Throughout the album, his instinct for melody is razor sharp, and in songs like ‘Wild Fire’ he matches that with lyrics that resonate almost despite themselves. There’s wisdom in the line “You’ve gotta get in line/ you’ve only got a little time/ to figure it out”, and you might find that, like me, it’ll be running through your mind for days after you hear it.

Multitudes by Feist

In a recent interview with podcast host Tom Power, Canadian musician Leslie Feist mistakenly talks about her past and future selves as if they were other people. She corrects herself, but it’s an interesting Freudian slip from someone whose new album is called Multitudes.

That title refers to the way her life changed once she became a mother, and not, as you might expect, an array of different styles within. In fact, the record is always consistent, often stripping away everything except her acoustic guitar and voice.

Feist’s music career began in 1991, founding a punk band when she was 15. Her debut solo album was released in 1999, and in 2007, she achieved chart placement with her record The Reminder. The song ‘1234’ was featured in an iPod commercial and became a critical and commercial hit, the kind of success that can loom over an artist - not always for the best.

This new, sixth album was born from three different catalysts: the birth of her adopted daughter in 2019, the death of her father, who she’d been quarantining with during COVID, and multiple stints participating in a friend’s songwriting exercise, which challenged those involved to write a song per day.

Most of what’s here is strikingly simple, which maybe speaks to that urgency. But it’s often admirably experimental, particularly in the way she layers her voice and deploys repetition, as on the track ‘Calling All The Gods’.

Near the start of her solo career, Feist spent time in Broken Social Scene, which drew attention for their inflated band lineup and sonic maximalism. I was unexpectedly reminded of that outfit here, in Multitudes’ rowdier moments. The song ‘Borrow Trouble’ features waves of violin and a saxophone solo, steadily building to become the album’s most rousing track.

Naming the record Multitudes feels appropriate in the way it relates to Feist accompanying herself throughout. Following her commercial success, she could have focussed on repeating it, and while there are plenty of pretty, delicate songs here, there are also ones like ‘In Lightning’ in which she uses her voice to bracing effect, with atypical harmonies evoking Bjork or Dirty Projectors.

It’s an album buoyed by creative contributions from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on string arrangements, and Mike Mills from R.E.M. helping produce, alongside many other notable names. But the inception of the album sonically was making Feist’s voice and guitar as intimate as possible, using custom-made foam soundproofing on both.

Her daughter’s birth and father’s death provided duelling inspiration, and those moments of joy or grief burst through on occasion. But mostly Multitudes is warm and wise, a reminder that this version of Leslie Feist remains a great singer-songwriter.