YASAWA GROUP

Matt Taylor co-founded The Growlers just past the turn of the century, and that was an immense force in the bellowing sound of the great American west. And maybe the Growlers did get too close to the sun but making guitar based pop music from California is to have to stare straight into all that glimmers and fades away. You have to answer to and show up at the Dick Dale Stomp or a Suicidal Tendencies’ circle pit, maybe an Eden Ahbez’s prayer circle and be back stage at No Doubt. The Growlers did this and beyond and now have their place in that long lineage.
But this is not that. This is YASAWA Group that we speak of, so let’s get that out of the way. Yasawa, the opening salvo of the Fijian lexicon's fifteen words for heaven. This is the Spoiled Milk And Honey fable of a Contemporary Musical Record in the early part of the 21 st century. This is the alternate soundtrack to the un-scheduled remake of ToLiveAndDieinLA, the pack of coyotes night howl, the train yards past Vernon, the sea gulls crying in the grime of a mid day white washed by the thin sky of the Anthropocene, the millions of gas pipes burning as the wind rustles over the rat shit wrapped in palm fronds. Is it blasphemous to speak poorly of the sun ? This is far and along past the music you knew about, but its familiarity is there in the distance. We know MT’s music and song writing, but we didn’t know about YASAWA GROUP’S roll out on the perfect wheel known as pop song writing. And the wheel need not be re invented, it will in on its own go through its unique and terrifying trajectory, a self made warping will lay waste to the wheels former form, be it a recorded album or the walk of life itself, so drop the globe and listen to it’s wobble, (the YASAWA GROUP methodology).
Fuck all standing there alone under the spot light and to come up fighting and clawing for these songs. With ‘Enter The Chrysalis’ MT leisurely steps down into the proscenium and out from under its arch into his own masterpiece. An album written at the edge of the looking glass that takes an inward vantage point on honest raw self reflection,
MT returned to the motherly bosom of long time pal and collaborator Kyle Mullarky, posted up on his ranch north of LA, these tracks were laid down in the forgotten rooms of an older Hollywood on and off, over the last 2.5 years.

so let’s focus on a new horizon now as the rear views cracked and rotten.
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Bio by Dirk Knibbe