Listening to Sam Zalta’s album Memento Mori, one starts to wonder how somebody whose music sounds so accomplished hasn’t been heard of yet.
Well, maybe the key reason for that is the fact that Memento Mori is Zalta’s debut. Still, Zalta has been around for a while as he has been playing guitar and keyboards for Bambara in their live configuration. He has been writing and recording since his teens under different aliases, sharing them only with close friends and family, and performing live scarcely in and around New York.
Still, the music on his official debut sounds like he has not only decades of experience behind him but also an abundance of talent that crosses and combines different genres with ease and aplomb.
You can hear quite a few of Zalta’s influences here – from good old Woodie Guthrie, through The Beach Boys, to more current artists like Nick Cave and modern psych purveyors Spiritualized. Zalta obviously has non-musical inspirations here, for beat poet Alen Ginsberg to esoteric thinker and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, or more renowned ones like Fellini and Lynch.
While very often such stylistic concoctions can spell disaster, Zalta seems to have all his inspirations deeply in his veins and the thirteen tracks here sound like they are coming from a single, truly accomplished source.
