#harkonen

Oil pastels fashion sketches i've been doing every week.

This time, costume designs from the different versions of Dune.

Every Record I Own - Day 527: Harkonen Shake Harder Boy

I’ve now talked about over 500 of my albums here and I sometimes struggle to talk about certain records without slipping into hyperbole. Certainly not every album I own is a winner, and sometimes I have to be frank about how some of the selections don’t necessarily resonate with me, how they remain in the collection as challenges or keepsakes. But overall I would describe the majority of my records as “good,” so after nearly three years of writing about my albums, how do I adequately communicate that something is not just good but actually great? I’m gonna give it a shot with Harkonen’s Shake Harder Boy.

Full disclaimer: I played guitar in a very early iteration of Harkonen, back when they were a noisy hardcore band called Doubting Thomas. Bassist Ben Verellen was the kid brother to the singer in my main band, Botch, and our roadie Mike Jones handled vocal duties. I think a grand total of one riff I wrote for the band managed to survive long enough to show up on the first Harkonen demo, but that’s the only vestige of my time in the group. I quit after a couple of show because I didn’t even own a guitar and I felt bad borrowing gear from people.

Harkonen would release a few 7″s and EPs with rotating cast members before downsizing to a three-piece with a guitarist named Bill Quimby (who would later start These Arms Are Snakes with our other guitarist Ryan Frederiksen). They released their debut self-titled LP with this line-up, and the album is still a solid slab of late ‘90s drop-tuned noise-addled hardcore---think Deadguy meets Unbroken. But Quimby bowed out after a tour West Coast tour with Jesuit despite getting picked up by Hydra Head Records. 

The rhythm section duo of Ben Verellen and drummer Matt Howard recruited their friend Casey Hardy to take over guitar duties. Hardy was primarily an indie rock kid, a disciple of the Northwest sound exemplified by bands like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. But that PNW musical fixation also extended to bands like Karp and Melvins, and Hardy absorbed their molasses-thick tones and proto-grunge power chord riffage and incorporated it all into Harkonen’s new sound, first captured on the band’s Grizz EP. 

But the band hit their apex with the release of their 2002 LP Shake Harder Boy. Take the heaviest moments in the Nirvana catalog, the thunderous scrappiness of Karp’s self-titled LP, and a healthy dose of hardcore energy and you have a good sonic approximation of the eleven tracks on Harkonen’s sophomore album. It’s far more straightforward than their debut album, as if the band realized that a few simple ideas made for stronger songs than shoehorning a dozen complicated riffs into three-minute chunks. Literally every song on the album is a banger, an onslaught of propulsive mid-tempo sludge-punk. If the band hadn’t been continuously derailed by bad luck---dropped tours, broken limbs, equipment theft, a disastrous set at Krazy Fest---they would’ve undoubtedly carried the torch for the heavy Pacific Northwest sound. Instead, the band quietly broke up around 2004. 

My love for this record obviously has something to do with being around the guys as they made this music. It resonates with me because it comes from a musical community I was a part of. But people didn’t forget about Harkonen after they broke up. The band reunited in 2010 for a series of sold out shows on both the West and East Coasts. Philly label Brutal Panda issued this vinyl version of the album in 2011, which quickly sold out and now fetches decent prices on Discogs. You can hear vestiges of Harkonen’s brand of heaviness in the more confrontational moments of Verellen’s current band, the revered Helms Alee. And ultimately, anytime I throw this record on around the uninitiated, there is a new convert.