I remember being really excited when I first heard a demo from these guys, one which their label circulated when they signed them a couple of months ago.  No time has been wasted in getting this album out into the big wide world however, so I’m guessing it was largely ready to go at the time Touch & Go/Quarterstick snapped them up.

In terms of descriptions, I guess you could slap this under that all-emcompassing, so broad as to be largely meaningless umbrella we call indie rock.  There’s a good, base* growl to it, out which break little flourishes of something more melodic or, from time to time, something more jerky and angular.  For the most part, however, this album tends to build its songs to a good pace and let them run with it – the sort of pace which inspires just a little bit of table drumming at the desk at Proper Job, to the raised eyebrows of all around.

The don’t rely on verse-bridge-chorus constructions either, which I really like.  There’s a shape to the whole song, generally, and the bit which gets its claws into you can be anything from a sudden, barking guitar detour to a more traditionally harmonised chorus.  This keeps you on your toes, because you can’t relax into that ‘here comes the bit I should pay attention to’ lazy listening which indie rock can often induce.

For such a short album, there’s an awful lot packed in as well, from shoegaze to pop, from the sombre to the (kind of) bouncy. A couple of the later songs are less strong than their earlier cousins, I would suggest, but this is still well worth your cash.  A really promising debut, in my opinion.

Sholi – All That We Can See

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Sholi – November Through June

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*No, I don’t mean bass, I mean base.

This may just be a free tour EP, a teeny little three-song affair, but it has done its job. I only heard about these guys because Josh from Touch & Go/Quarterstick Records emailed me to let me know that they had signed them up to release their debut album.

As I wait for that to become available all I have in the meantime is a free digital EP that they were selling on their last tour, comprising the a-sides of their previous two single and a gorgeous acoustic song which is the record’s title track. The three songs are all very different, and I would like to post them all there, but that would be mean. All That We Can is nice and shoegazey, and Hejrat, a Googoosh cover, is an odd but good mix of Spaghetti Western soundtrack with just a little dash of Arabic in there somewhere. I’ve never heard of Googoosh, but this is really good, although the Arabic thing could just be me imagining things, but there you go.

To download this little gem go their MySpace page and use the link in their latest blog posting.  Their earlier stuff can be bought from their website here, and for now that’s all she wrote.  I’m really looking forward to this album.

Sholi – Dreams Before People