Haar – Haar (2010)

Hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland today we have Haar and their self-titled debut EP. The band plays a mixture of Black Metal with progressive elements that sounds a bit like Wolves In The Throne Room meets Deathspell Omega. While the band’s sound is not strikingly original, they can still craft solid tunes of darkness.

Featuring 26 minutes of music divide in 3 songs this EP release will certainly entertain all the fans of obscure sounding Black Metal. The band’s sound is greatly enhanced by recording all instruments at the same time, providing enough rawness and a live feeling to their music.

The riffing through this album is not your typical fast-as-hell BM riffing, but rather a more down-tempo crushing sound that will slowly grow on you. There is enough variety to keep us from falling asleep. As mentioned before there are similarities to Deathspell Omega, but Haar sounds way cleaner than this band. But don’t get us wrong, the band does have some killer faster-paced sections with all the double kicking glory you can expect from a BM band, but they use them in a more conservative fashion than other bands.

The drumming is spot on and provides the perfect backdrop for the distorted guitars and monster bass guitar line. Vocal-wise Gareth Cook does a pretty solid job in providing low harsh screams. The switching between deeper growls to the low harsh screams is very well done and changes things up a bit.

Haar shows good promise when it comes to crafting solid and crushing songs. If the band worked a bit more in creating more elaborate compositions they will surely be on their way to get more recognition on this very crowded genre. As for the atmosphere goes, the band creates a very thick and eerie guitar-driven atmosphere that will surely creep you out on dark nights. We recommend you to get this release from the band’s site before they become ‘cult’ and you regret it.

Release: May, 2010

Country: UK