Los Yesterdays

Los Yesterdays are a Chicano soul band from LA based around the creative collaboration between Gabriel Rowland and Victor Benavides. Chicano obsession with soul music began in the mid 1950s, when young Chicanos, many of whom were first-generation immigrants raised on their parents’ mariachi and norteño records, were searching for a music of their own. They began in the smog-spitting gas guzzlers and carpeted living rooms and shoe-melting playground blacktop of the 1970s. On their debut LP, Frozen In Time, Los Yesterdays pay yearning, bleeding-heart homage to groups like Tejano brown-eyed soul legends Sunny & The Sunliners and the Midniters, a group of East Los Angeles teens whose frequently genre-agnostic work added a Chicano lilt to Black art. Like compas Thee Sacred Souls and Thee Sinseers, theirs is a new-old music. On songs like “Loves Is A Game For Fools” and “Nobody’s Clown,” Los Yesterdays filter love-struck R&B crooning through guitar-strumming Mexican balladeering; the result is something that sounds like the Los Angeles of yesterday and today. the indelible, immovable Los Angeles of cruising Whittier Boulevard, of cold drinks on the porch on blazing summer nights, of watching a blue-orange toxic sunset and wondering if they are thinking about you. Los Angeles changes; Los Angeles stays the same. Los Yesterdays have changed, outgrown their childhood barrios and the bands of their early 20s and their private garage hermitude; Los Yesterdays are Frozen In Time.