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Album Review

Sholi

Sholi
Sholi

[Quarterstick; 2009]

6.4

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

Payam Bavafa, Sholi's guitarist and lead singer, has called the band's self-titled debut a meditation on "the perversion of truth by memory" in interviews and cited his time analyzing brainwaves for a neuroscience research company as an influence on his lyrics. The album's producer is Greg Saunier from Deerhoof, who took on the band after Bavafa sent him some demos, including "Hejrat", their reinterpretation of a song by the controversial Iranian pop singer Googoosh. (The "Hejrat" 7" landed Sholi in the 2008 Music Issue of The Believer.) Live, they are given to performing epic renditions of Joanna Newsom's "Sprout and the Bean". Translation: these are some brainy fellows, and if all of this background info didn't adequately prepare you for an album of proggy guitar suites with constantly shifting time signatures, then you probably just weren't paying close enough attention.

Luckily, as far as proggy guitar suites go, these are some lovely, liquid compositions. "All That We Can See" opens the album with a perfumed gust of sound, as drummer Jonathon Bafus tosses little fills everywhere like sputtering wires, and then a guitar line vaguely reminiscent of Radiohead's "Knives Out" surfaces. From there, the song shifts abruptly from acoustic strumming to full-bore jamming to round-robin vocal chanting, but the descending guitar figure holds everything together, the rhythmic and harmonic anchor tugging the song to Earth as it threatens, repeatedly, to float away.

This back-and-forth between structure and aimlessness characterizes most of Sholi, which accounts for both its strengths and its weaknesses. The way the album is sequenced-- more a series of interrelated vignettes than songs, each track melting quietly into the next-- gives the album a nicely hazy, lucid-dream quality. The problem, simply put, is that most every song sounds the same. Sholi are clearly aiming for an immersive experience, but it can't be a good sign that I had to keep shaking myself to note the vanishing points between songs, or that I had to isolate "November Through June" five or six times to realize it was the one with the catchy chorus.

Bavafa's limpid, somewhat bland tenor unfortunately contributes to the eye-glaze factor. For all the vitality of the music-- whether it's Bafus subdividing beats into hailstorms of counter-rhythms on "Dance for Hours" or the doleful waltz of "Spy in the House of Memories"-- Bavafa's mournful singing, which never alters tone or grain, does a pretty thorough job of smoothing it all out. Bafus is the band's secret weapon; his rhythmically restless and effortlessly virtuosic drumming manages to power the songs single-handedly and somehow paradoxically stay out of their way. And Bavafa has a good chemistry with him, building an improbably feather-light song on top of his clomping, stop-start 5/4 beat on "Tourniquet". But when Bafus isn't pushing from the back, everything falls slack, and the album blurs into gray. Individual moments stand out, but Sholi isn't an album you immerse yourself in as much as notice from time to time.

— Jayson Greene, June 22, 2009


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