LAHAR

LAHAR are an extreme powerful Dutch Doom band, and they belong to the more original bands in the current scene. There aren't much newcomers around, that I really like, but LAHAR's last demo was one of the best, I had received in the last months. They've combined classic Doom with some sort of Sludge, what reminds me to outstanding bands like Warhorse f.e. LAHAR use unorthodox song-structures, which are packed with massive and aggressive riffs and fronted by the crusty vocals from Bert-René. They had also played on the DSR III festival, and I guess they had found some new fans and friends there. Well, anyway, Bert-René was so kind to answer my questions and the result is informative and entertaining. So, grab a beer and read on...

Welcome, Laharians! Thanks for giving me such a blast with your latest release, entitled "Demo Mmiu". You've got the right weighty riffs, a heavy significant tone, an outstanding singer and interesting song structures.How do you feel about the three tracker and how much exposure did the demo get?

Thanks for your kind words. We were pretty satisfied with the demo. Not completely satisfied, but considering the costs of the recording, it turned out good. We also got very good responses from various internetsites and magazines so that's cool too.

I like your lyrics, because they are very metaphoric and bloody nihilistic. Especially "From Weakness" contains some heavy religious metaphors. Bert, where do you draw influences from when writing the lyrics?

My influences come from all kinds of things. 'Words for flesh' is entirely influenced by a chapter from Dante's 'The Divine Comedy'. In 'The apocalypse machine', Dante is making sweet love to a robot. And in 'From Weakness' Dante meets Jesus. So you could say Dante is a major influence. But generally the themes of my lyrics are related to whatever book I'm reading at the time and is inspiring enough to provide me with lyrics. Yes, I steal a lot. I stole an entire song from Melville's 'Moby Dick', sue me.

It's very hard to accomplish anything new in the doom genre, and, of course, LAHAR doesn't re-invent this musical style new, but in my opinion you don't rip-off any bands and you're sounding authentic instead of just writing 25 min. long songs, just because it seems to be "extreme" or shit like that. What do you think about my statement and what's your opinion in general about the current state of doom metal?

Well, thanks. We know we're not inventing anything new. We have all kinds of influences. We can hear them, but we give them our own twist and try to create something new. So sounding authentic is a big compliment to us. We're not making music to be "extreme", "extreme" is very overrated in my opinion. When we started with the band, we didn't know about any doom scene. We were just a bit tired of the overload of stoner bands and wanted to create some authentic doom again.

A friend of mine showed me some internet sites after he heard what we were doing. That's how I found out about new bands like Reverend Bizarre and Thee Plague of Gentlemen (to name but a few). Maybe you can say there's a bit of a doom-metal revival going. As with all revivals, a lot of shit comes drifting up. But the amount of good bands is increasing as well so that's a good thing. Good (new) bands being Rev. Bizarre, TPOG, The Gates of Slumber, Rising Dust, Mirror of Deception and from the Netherlands Heavy Lord and Mary Bell (which isn't really doom, but cool anyway). I probably forgot a few bands, but these bands are in my CD-player a lot.