Harpoon has got to have the best T-shirt of any band in the city right now. It’s black, with a high-contrast white baby seal on the front under the band name, spelled out in Old English lettering. It works on two levels: it uses a traditional metal/crust design template to subvert the form by crossing it with something out of Cute Overload, but also the juxtaposition of that cute, defenseless seal pup and that sinister-looking word suggest a scene of immense violence waiting to happen just offscreen.
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It’s easy for a band like Harpoon to have a sense of humor about itself. Harpoon’s recipe for grindcore—blended with atouch of thrash and spiced up with a little powerviolence—is so punishing that dressing it up with any tough-guy posturing would just be overkill. That’s not uncommon in grind (see, for instance, Anal Cunt), which is one of metal’s stranger cousins. It takes metal and hardcore tropes and pushes them to absurd extremes, so the guitar riffing is repetitive and fast enough to become slightly hypnotic, the drums are such a flurry of blast beats that it can be hard to pin down an actual rhythm, and the words—not that you can usually make out what the singer is shrieking—often read like stuff that gets cops called to high school English classes. (There’s even a sub-subgenre called splatter grind for the real sick stuff.)
The fact that the beats come from a cheapo Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine is only amusing up until the point—probably within the first 20 seconds or so of a song—where one of the many warp-speed fills programmed by guitarist Dean Costello pounds you into submission.
Harpoon’s also aligned with locals like Hewhocorrupts and (Lone) Wolf & Cub, who approach metal with the attitude of DIY punks. “We like club shows,” Vast-Binder says, “but the best shows are in spaces, be it somebody’s basement, in the front of a store, whatever.”
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With Plague Bringer, Weekend Nachos, the Muzzler, and Tension Generation, Sun 2/15, 6PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, 773-281-4444, $8. A
