Urvanovic

Amateurs

(Survivalist)

Slipping into a subgenre of Scottish music that currently houses Turning Plates, Quickbeam and a couple of others, Edinburgh's Urvanovic use their seven-piece set-up to bring an epic vision to each song's perspective. Folk roots regularly peep through the instrumental layers, most notably when Seonaid Stevenson takes a lead vocal (as on opening track Open Ground) but the fact that icy notes are falling all around her like musical snow, even as she's wrapped up in warm strings, suggests there's a defined chamber-prog element to frontman Tom Irvine's compositions. Urvanovic can build it up and bring it back down with the best of them, and their strengths probably lie more in the harmonic construction of a song than any easy melodic hook: listen as a trumpet spirals through the small gaps left between the notes of Think Fast's terrific riff, or as multiple voices transcend the notion of mere backing vocals on The Worry Trail. This is a debut album with no lack of ideas, becoming ever more impressive each time it's played.

Alan Morrison