• Bambi Molesters
• Croatia
• LHD
• surf rock

Published on 31/01/2023 11:00 am

Both avid listeners of this here show will remember that the very first band we featured were the now-defunct Bambi Molesters. And we still think it was beautiful. However, in a completely unexpected piece of good news, Balkan Express is happy to report that three quarters of Bambi Molesters have reunited in a band called LHD.

LHD stands for Lada, Hrvoje and Dinko. And not to put too fine a point on it, LHD are, in fact, Bambi Molesters minus one guitar. Of the original cast, only Dalibor is missing. Not that it matters, really, because what LHD lack in numbers they make up for in experience.

Passing the time

Bambi Molesters joined the choir fantastic in 2018 and it wasn’t a year later that Lada, Hrvoje and Dinko started jamming together again. At first, it wasn’t anything serious, more like just the only way they knew of how to pass the time. But it soon turned out they still had things to say or – to be more precise – to express. Which is how LHD was born.

In a way, LHD is all about going back to the roots. Specifically, a sound that is full of soul, psychedelic and garage rock. That, and the fact that LHD took almost two years to complete their inaugural album. Which, to be honest, not every band can afford to do.

One of the reasons LHD can do things at their own pace is, of course, their mileage. Band members have been around the block a couple of times and know the pitfalls of the music industry. Then again, there is also the fact that they don’t need their music to make a living.

Cool factor

And just to give you an example of how LHD live their lives off stage. Lada Furlan Zaborac, LHD’s bass player is a high-school professor of English language in Sisak, a river town in central Croatia. One can only assume that having a surf-rock bass player for your English prof significantly adds to the cool factor of her students. And when she is not lecturing young’uns on the proper use of the definite article, she translates. It is probably no coincidence that she was one of the two translator to translate Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 biography Born To Run into Croatian.

That said, the pandemic was also a factor in LHD’s production pace. Their first album is titled Off The Grid. Which references both their refusal of the musical meat-grinder with ever evolving trends and fads, as well as the fact that whole swaths of society have quite literally fallen off the grid during the pandemic – and realised they quite like it. LHD included.

Check out LHD on YouTube, Bandcamp and wherever you get your music from, and Balkan Express will be back next week.

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Balkan Express takes weekly trips into contemporary musical production of, you guessed it, the Balkans. Forget gusle and tamburice, this show is about rock, pop and a sense of humour. Well, at least there’s guitars. On air most Tuesdays in a new-and-improved time-slot at 1100 hrs. Usually. Your train conductor is Aljaž (aka @pengovsky) who once did the world a solid and decided never to sing again in public. Which is why he ended up doing radio.