Search - Harkonen :: Shake Harder Boy

Review taken from http://www.aversionline.com

A.5 | Richmond, VA | 07/24/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Upon the first listen this record sort of blew by me and didn't really do much for me. Harkonen has always been hit or miss in my opinion. I wasn't into their old full-length on Wreck-Age, but I thought their more recent EP's were pretty damn good. So I never know what to expect. This record churns out more of their very rhythmic material with a good dose of dissonance in some of the guitar textures, and after a few listens it's really growing on me more and more. I'm not really sure why I missed it the first time around, but this is some energetic and creative material. It rocks, yeah. But there's more going on under the surface, granted the bottom line is still a good song is a good song. "Baristas Get Stalked" has a little bit of subtle melody with a generally more creative and moving approach that really blows me away - definitely my favorite song on the disc. "Caseydriver" uses lots of noisy feedback behind the framework, and similarly tracks like "Easy Prey" even throw some unexpected experimental textures into the background for short periods of time, creating an odd ambient sort of hum that works very well with the driving force of the chord progressions and such. "All This Time I Thought Your Name Was Cool Dude" builds on this even more, with lots of synth tones (I assume) and layered vocals over nothing but massive drums and bass. Awesome. The recording is slick. The guitars are nice and textured with perfect clarity, a great distorted bass tone is present along with totally natural and warm percussion, and I really like the dry force of the yelling vocals as well. I don't think I would change anything at all other than to possibly make the bass more noticeable. Very nice work. Visually things are pretty wild, with lots of busy overlapping textures of light blue, black, and metallic gold, a few interesting band shots (including a photo of the three members' torsos clad in t-shirts with their individual faces on them), and some crisp text amidst it all. And don't forget the bunnies (look at the record, you'll understand). The lyrics are all printed vertically in metallic gold down the long stretch of panels that fold out from the booklet. All of the songs are pretty odd in content, and some of the tracks are shockingly brief in the lyrical department. "All this time I thought your name was cool dude, But it wasn't you, All this time I thought your name was true blue, But it wasn't you." The liner notes mention "live footage" and an "enhanced portion", but when I popped the disc into the ol' computer I got nothing but audio. Weird. But anyway, this is a great record. A great full-length. So I'm pleased to find that the promising work of their EP's hasn't been lost here, granted the record does run a tasteful length of about 35 minutes. Check it out..."