Click to listen to our feature episode on Sholi!

San Francisco art-pop quartet Sholi have been quite busy lately. In addition to continued work on the band’s highly anticipated debut full length album, which they hope to release later this year, they’ve just put out a new covers 7″ titled Hejrat. The band also has a number of shows this month in California and New York, including a show tonight at Cafe du Nord alongside The Castanets and El Olio Wolof.

The A-side, also titled “Hejrat,” is a cover of a song by 1970s Iranian pop star Googoosh, sung in Farsi and reinterpreted musically with Sholi’s signature layered pop sound. The B-side is a cover of Joanna Newsom’s “The Sprout and the Bean.” The band explains the connection between the two songs as:

Both songs speak to a displacement, a search for place or identity, that could be interpreted at the individual or cultural level, and we find that the pairing ties two worlds together in a deeply moving way, at a time when political rhetoric unfortunately escalates to the opposite extreme.

The 7″ songs aren’t the only covers the members of Sholi have been doing. Eric Ruud challenged some friends to cover Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose,” and recently posted the results to the band’s web site. Some of the versions are surprisingly good although, depending on how many times you heard the song in the mid-90s, you might not be able to listen to all of them in one sitting.

You can order Sholi’s new 7″ and see all of the tour dates at Sholi’s web site. You can listen to “Hejrat” and more music at their MySpace page.

Tonight’s show starts at 9pm and is $10.