This lovingly packaged new 7″ from San Francisco’s Sholi contains two cover songs, “Hejrat” by Iranian pop-diva Googoosh, and “Sprout and the Bean” by Joanna Newsom. Sholi interprets both, with lead singer Payam Bavafa singing in Farsi on the Googoosh track.

Googoosh was the most celebrated pop-singer of Iran during the 1970’s before the Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, most pop-music was banned from the country and she stopped singing entirely. Iranians fled to the United States and Europe, and Googoosh’s voice resonated as the soundtrack for their former lives in Iran before everything changed. This 7″ connects these exiled Iranian’s search for cultural identity and understanding with the broader existential themes embedded in Joanna Newsom’s deeply moving song, “The Sprout and the Bean.”

The music itself is sprawling and complex, with intricate, powerful drumming, interweaving guitar arpeggios, beautiful keyboard melodies, and virtuosic vocals. Conceptually and and on a pure sonic level, this is a very special piece of music.

TRACKLIST:

01. Hejrat
02. Sprout and the Bean

PRESS QUOTES:

Pitchfork:
“A bit like the Microphones at their existential best…”

The Bay Bridged:
“While Sonic Youth´s Thurston Moore has often been heralded for cross-breeding Indie Rock with Free Jazz, his experiments were more of the No-Wave variety and were not as heavily undertaken in the context of his own group, but moreso in the form of side projects and one-offs. On the other hand, Sholi is incorporating many of the inflections of jazz and good ol´ indie rock, simultaneously - in the eight hands of its four members. We´ll be watching these eight hands very closely.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian:
“What meets your ear should be mathematically ethereal and strangely danceable - the group hides its pop-imp self under a trench coat festooned with knives and chain saws, like that of the woman in the Far Side who told her date she was going to slip into something more comfortable.”

California Aggie:

“If I were the sort of person whp could see music as color, the guitar, organ and bass onslaught that Payam Bavafa, Greg Hagel and Eric Ruud sent into the ether might have been just a shade darker than the beer glow quality of Polaroid Time-Zero cameras.”