Review: Ur Draugr / Haar

Ur Draugr / Haar
ATMF

Well, to be honest I think that order of bands should be here opposite. The reason is that HAAR have three songs here and UR DRAUGR only one. but if they decided that it should be just like that than… For the rest, it hasn’t meaning in which order bands are mentioned and so on. The most important is music, right?!?

But before I’ll tell you about music I’ll present both bands. Probably at least some part of you thought that bands are from the same country. That’s truth that in the UR DRAUGR’s land of origin there was band called HAAR, but it doesn’t exist anymore, as I know. But this HAAR which we’re talking about is coming from the capitol of Scotland – Edinburgh. And here I could write couple of lines about rich and very interesting history of the city, its numerous monuments, famous writers born in Edinburgh, several cultural festivals… But let’s be honest – it’s impossible to write about all these things in few lines. Well, it’d be even hard to do on few pages. So let’s leave this on some other occasion and maybe also for somebody else…

For us the most important here is five guys (on pic on Encyclopedia Metallum I see only four, here in booklet – three ones) who play in HAAR. The fact is that second guitarist, Ross Oliver, joined the band in 2015. So maybe on pics are only founders of the band?!? NEVERMIND!!! As I said before, Scottish present us here three songs. They call their music by Progressive/Atmospheric Black Metal. Well, I can agree with this first word which describes what we can hear. But only if under the term “progressive” we understand technically advanced. There’re here very long, even totally dominated fragments when we listen just to Black Metal. When I say “Black Metal” I mean this more “waltz” one, playing in middle tempos mostly. It doesn’t mean that guys can’t or don’t know speed-up! But that are rather exceptions from rule. Riffs are very often quite typical for mentioned above (few times) sub-genre of Metal – short, raw, rather not so various and blasphemous. But there’re also parts when they become more, I don’t afraid to use this word, twisted. In general music is sometimes eclectic and it can be something what’ll repulse, probably, true-blue fans. But I’m just a poser and like very much when it happens something un music! And I can hear directly that Scottish have very fine ideas. So who cares that it’s not the most classical Black Metal on the Black earth?!? Surely not me!!!

UR DRAUGR comes from very off the grid place, even if it’s fourth most populated city in Australia where live a little more than 2 millions of people. The fact is that from Perth (by the way, strongly connected with Scotland – by its name) to nearest huge city, Adelaide, is almost 3.000 km. Anyhow, Perth hasn’t long history and is the capitol of the largest and in the same time the less populated state of Australia (and on the world as well) – in whole Western Australia live maybe 2,3 millions of people indeed. But even in places like that Metal flames are keeping alive! The very good example here is UR DAUGR. That’s young band which was formed in 2014. Until now they recorded EP “The Wretched Ascetic” and full-length “With Hunger undying”. Both stuffs were released in 2015, by the way.

As I wrote before they present us only one song on this split. Music which’s playing by these three Australians is twisted and rather hard to describe by some term. They call it by Black/Death Metal, but… Well, there’s a lot of Death Metal here for sure. But it isn’t classic one. The only what I could compare it with is Dutch style, but Drew (Griffiths – bass, guit, voc), Mealstorm (dr) and Dean (Lockhart – guit) is even more… to find right word… broken. Maybe something like DISHARMONIC ORCHESTRA or PUNGENT STENCH a little, maybe Scottish KORPSE?!? What about Black Metal I can hear hardly this sub-genre here. But whole character of this music is surely dark and devilish. Riffs are broken, short and change quite often, not all the time, but often. There’re some “light motives”, but even they aren’t repeated too many times. Drums play also in very various and broken way. It changes often, even if there aren’t some passages. Vocal is something between classic growling and hysteric, sometimes a little desperate scream. In general everything sounds strange and isn’t easy to listen to. Anyway, I can easily hear that musicians have also other influences than only Metal ones. The clearest it’s in first part of the song where (if we don’t count vocal) it has more to do with dark Jazz or something. But rest is in its way Brutal. Tempos aren’t mostly fast. Well, they’re, like whole music, rather broken – sometimes becomes faster, mostly are middle ones.

OK, end of this writing. Try to get this split if you’re interested in that. Music is really good and fresh. In case of UR DRAUGR I’d even use word “original”, but only in this positive way. It’s truth that this isn’t music for all, but it’s for sure Brutal in its way and 100000% Metal one – influences of other styles make it only richer and more excited in my opinion. HAAR is, in comparison with Australians, more typical band, what doesn’t mean that it’s typical one.

urdraugr@gmail.com
haarsounds@googlemail.com