w/Free Verse, Cold Sweat
Sat Feb 22, Vera Project, 8 pm, $7 ($6 w/club card).
Lately, I've been getting lost in the black holes of math-riddled metal on Harkonen's new record, Shake Harder Boy. Casey Hardy's guitar parts bludgeon with long, slow strikes one moment, and shudder noisily the next, sending off electric effects that could perk up a Pixies song, but instead are connecting with the steely structures of this Northwest metalcore act.
At the end of songs like "Bargains Only," the ironfistedness subsides, fading into instrumental oceans where Ben Verellen's bass lines quietly ebb before crashing into white squalls. Drummer Matt Howard keeps the bag-of-cement beats coming, not so much keeping time as crashing through it. In a region where Botch was once king and bands like the Whip become quick heroes, Harkonen should be royalty. But after seven years together, they're barely bringing in a consistent crowd.
Maybe it's because they're stuck in Tacoma.
But the band has a huge fan in Morgan Henderson, bassist for the Blood Brothers, who calls Shake Harder Boy "fucking awesome," adding, "any band that can play heavy music and not play it with their penis is a great band." Although they lay claim to hardcore roots, Harkonen have left anger management behind, expanding into aggressive post-metal daydreams punctuated by Verellen's angered screams, Hardy's tinny outbursts, and Howard's machine-gun rat-tat-tat-tats.
"Hardcore is testosterone-built," Howard says. "None of us are musclebound jock guys. We're sillier than that. After a while, it was like we don't really relate to these bands, but what bands do we relate to? Because [while] we're a heavy, kind of pissed-off band, hopefully there's some kind of sense of humor about it."
With Shake Harder Boy (a line lifted from The Simpsons) and song titles like "All This Time I Thought Your Name Was Cool Dude," Harkonen show you don't have to lose your sense of humor to play heavy music--but the skills within this trio are definitely something to be taken seriously.
