Labels: self released
Review by: James Williams
This is another debut album from another UK melodic hardcore band from the south
of England. I’m not sure what’s in the water down there but they seem to churning
out a lot of new bands of this ilk lately. I blame Your Demise! Anyway, onto the
album. It’s eight tracks of well produced, modern hardcore with plenty of mosh. It
starts with the tuneful intro of Birth. It goes on a bit longer than maybe it should do,
but it does see Ursa Major flow straight into Black Lights, so it’s not all bad. The song
features furious screams, done in a southern accent instead of a faux-American twang
and I wasn’t expecting the Alexisonfire style singing mid-way through the track! The
music is as you’d expect; crunching guitars mixed with post-hardcore influences and a
bouncing rhythm section underpinning it all. The Two Hundred has that epic feel to
its intro, but one that you may be familiar with. There’s a lot of palm muting going on
during the verses too. There’s plenty for you if you’re into your modern hardcore and
Ursa Major seem to be very adept songwriters, especially when sticking to what they
do best. Those cleanly sung choruses are very good and actually add to the music
overall. They are prone to moments of angular and off-kilter madness, like in the riffs
of Dead Eyes. In spite of the modern touches from the guitars, when they throw a nod
to early post-hardcore they sound very good indeed. I suppose the mosh-parts are a
necessary evil on Old Bones, but I guess I just prefer things a bit simpler. At times
they kind of remind me of old Killswitch Engage, due to their instrumentation, which
is no bad thing to me at least. This is especially the case in first single, Fist Of The
Fleet. The more introspective passages during the song are really satisfying and show
a mature song-writing ethic within the band. Ursa Major keep their song-lengths
down to help make more of an impact and even during longer songs like Anchored
and Clipped Wings, they use plenty of ideas and textures which stop you from
pressing the skip button. Anchored is more mosh heavy, but still well balanced due to
the clean vocals and good song structure. The occasional gang-vocals mixed with the
southern accent gives them a bit of attitude and character too. Clipped Wings is more
of a ballad to begin with, featuring piano and cleanly sung vocal harmonies. Then the
dramatic guitar comes in and along with the drums, creates a pretty big wall of sound,
before Ursa Major switch back to more familiar territory. It’s left to In Death to be the
rousing ending. Full of powerful drums and metalcore influence. This is probably one
of the better debut’s I’ve heard in a while. Ursa Major have been honing their chops in
a live setting for a while and it shows. They’ve got plenty right here and will
definitely gain a bigger following.