Search - Matt Walters :: Echo on Ep

The pyrotechnics of pop culture played little part in Matt Walters' awakening. His most powerful musical memories involve a lone voice in a tent at one of the countless folk festivals his parents dragged him along to as a kid. One such memory goes like this. "There were about three people watching and it was incredible. It blew my mind. One voice, brilliant lyrics, so powerful and believable. That's when it hit home, that you can be so moving and effective so simply. I went home and started trying to write." This far down that path, it doesn't even matter which singer-songwriter was responsible for Matt's epiphany. Just as their voice was theirs, he knew he had nothing until he found his own. ECHO ON, his first hauntingly unadorned EP, makes his journey from there to here sound easy. In fact it was the culmination of a long voyage of discovery from Melbourne to Sydney to London, before it was finally captured with a few friends in a room in his small hometown in the southwest of Victoria. You may think you hear shades of Nick Drake's percussive fingerpicking and pastoral longing in the title track. You might catch refractions of Bob Dylan's oblique visions, or feel the gentle swell of the alt-country wave at his back. But you won't hear Matt striving for anything but himself. The four tracks share an atmosphere of isolation that rings like a secret thought.