I spend most of my time writing about the seasoned music makers and polished performers of the grassroots music scene, and, doing so, it is easy to forget how it all begins. No matter how lauded your songs become, how regarded your performance, how hallowed your name is, we all started in music the same way – you form a band with your mates, you work out how to write songs, you blag a few gigs and become a band by getting out there and learning on the job as you go, growing up in public.
Yesterday’s Tomorrow is the sound of that in action. It’s not the sound of a band resting on their laurels; it’s not the jaded, phoned-in sound that many bands resort to when they realise that they already have a captive audience. It’s the sound of ambition, hunger, and songs from the heart. It’s raw, it’s fierce, and it’s fucking glorious!
Everything is summed up in the physicality of the album itself —a rewritable CD with a handwritten and individually numbered scrawl (mine’s #23), in a slim case with cut-and-pasted covers. For those of us of a certain age, it immediately evokes memories of nights spent folding posters into covers for vinyl singles or cutting up artwork to fit in a cassette case.
Once you give it a spin, you find 12 slices of post-Britpop, punk-spirited, raw, driving indie. And while songs like “Chasing the Sun” are perfect at a time when Oasis are dominating the headlines once more, and “Just A Game” wanders into those same psychedelic realms that “Diesel Park West” coloured their sound with, this is no mere retro-gazing exercise, no pastiche or sonic plundering. “You’ll Never Find Love Like This Again” shows real invention. “Story To Tell” is a jaunty slice of contemporary indie, and “Drugs and Tea” is anthemic in the extreme.
For now, Ursa Way might be influenced by the ’90s Britpop template, nothing wrong with that, we are all inspired by what has gone before. Still, there is enough here that is of their own making, enough to suggest that they are already finding their own sound, evolving into a forward-thinking, of-the-moment indie band for the here and now. Not only that, but one with the musical chops and the urge to push themselves as writers.
As some wise person, probably wearing a bucket hat, once said, “it ain’t where you’ve been, it’s where you’re at, maaan.” Where this band is at is precisely where they should be…where they are going is the really exciting part of the story.
