L.A. Salami’s two albums to date, ‘Dancing With Bad Grammar’ (2016) and ‘The City of Bootmakers’ (2018), have seen the London-based artist present a singular vision. His evocative, poetic lyrics span everything from grand existential questions to vignettes of everyday life as well as the affairs and anxieties of modern Britain. As NPR noted, his “poetry channels the fierceness I first heard in Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, but with a prowess found in today’s best hip-hop.”
Now L.A. Salami pushes his elegantly haunted poetry to the foreground with his new EP ‘L.A. Salami’s Walkbout’, which will be released on September 27th via Sunday Best. It’s the first in a trilogy of thematically-linked EPs that will continue with further releases next year.
Set in “some nameless generic megacity”, the seven-track EP focuses on the experiences of Papalious Stokely. Equipped with little more than a pocket-sized bottle of brandy for company and comfort, Papalious Stokely explores the dirty extremes of this tired metropolis: a sprawling sea of cheap hookers, cocaine habits, whisky bottles, knife violence, jacked up hack ideologies, street gangs and inspirational hooligans.
Echoing the distant spirit of Jack Kerouac reciting conscious poetry to the rhythm and colour of the jazz bands of the era, this is a walk through L.A. Salami’s own subconscious stream with Butcher Pete (better known as Petter Grevelious from Francobollo) providing the beats. Papa Stokely wrote half of the EP, while his disconcerting doppelganger L.A. Salami crafted the rest.
L.A. Salami’s Walkabout’ has been launched with its lead track ‘Tinder’. Set to a bluesy backing loop, the track ruminates on the nature of Tinder and the wider world of dating apps. Are they a means to an end? A quick fix to escape moments of micro-boredom? Or a hypnotically addictive escape from a world of monotony and borderline poverty?
