The Close Combat of Karate
Karate, the jazz-infused rock trio from Boston, recently made their return with ‘Make It Fit,' their first studio album in more than 20 years. In honour of their comeback, I reflect on the stellar career of one of my favourite bands.
It’s a quote often attributed to Joe Lewis, one of the great karateka: “you don’t have to be flashy, you have to be fundamental.”
In the nearly 15 years starting in 1993, Massachuttsetts outfit Karate toyed with this sharp philosophical razor. In the beginning it was guitarist-vocalist Geoff Farina and drummer Gavin McCarthy, two Berklee College of Music students, going back and forth in their basement; an ad on a record store noticeboard, citing influences such as Lungfish, Fugazi, and Codeine, brought bassist Eamon Vitt into the fray. The trio has christened themselves Karate, taking to the stage in December of the same year. “A few 22-year-olds thought it was funny and ironic for five minutes,” recalled Farina of the name. “Always regretted it.”
It’s 2024, and after a nearly two decade hiatus, Karate are back. Reissued and reanimated by the good people at Numero Group, the trio have ridden their new wave of recognition to a seventh studio album, Make It Fit, out November 2024. In honor of their unlikely return, I decided to weaponize my obsession and reflect on Karate’s long and varied career, diving into what makes them one of my favorite bands.
You can cut it both ways: Karate could be an apt mantle or an ill-fitting guise. A deft, disciplined striking art, practitioners of Karate channel both power and poise. There’s a combat application and a cerebral form, flipsides that mirror Karate’s rock riffage and noodling jazz sensibilities. On 1996’s Karate, the trio leaned into their hardcore inspirations, pairing their searing arrangements with Farina’s earnest vocals. Initially compared to groups like Slint — in the early ‘90s, a rite of passage for any post-rock group — Karate took their first cues from punk and post-hardcore luminaries. “My three favorite bands when I was a teenager were the Minutemen, Beefeater and a band that had a huge influence on me called Dain Bramage,” Farina told TIDAL in 2021. These influences, steeped in the spirit of the Revolution Summer of 1985, informed Karate’s eclectic take on post-rock.
Their eponymous debut opens with “Gasoline,” from which the inevitable Slint comparisons flow: heavy riffs gives way to sparse bass-lined verses, with Farina’s distinctive tenor breaking as he wanders through fractured poetics. The timbre of his voice, alongside the tone of his guitar, would develop further, but the essence of the pairing is the sonic heart of Karate. “- - -” exemplifies a ‘90s urban angst, with a lovelorn Farina borne through the repetitious emptiness of the everyday. The image of the car — a constant through Karate’s catalogue — establishes itself immediately, and the murkiness of interpersonal relations flow freely from his reflective pen.
In Place Of Real Insight, Karate’s sophomore album, arrived in 1997, and with it came a brief but notable shift. In the wake of their debut, Jeff Godard joined the group on bass, allowing Eamonn Vitt to move into second guitar, a position he’d vacate soon after Insight to pursue a medical career. Insight, the group’s only four-piece record, curtails the furious heights of Karate, with that rock-out anger substituted for slowcore slack. “This, Plus Slow Song” pulls back on the thrashing arrival that was “Gasoline,” laying jazz and blues influence over McCarthy’s delicate kit. His crisp hi-hat ushers us into “New Martini,” a brisk rocker that sees Farina and Vitt pull off a lively call-and-response.
This stop-and-start approach shows Karate in flux, embracing new permutations in lineup and expanding their widening net of inspiration. The quieter cuts are quieter, the louder cuts louder; Vitt takes lead vocal for “On Cutting,” an album track that runs disconcerting, plodding, and in fits, snarling. “New New” shines a spotlight on Godard’s nimble bass and McCarthy’s punchy kit, even as the vocal strains atop the roaring guitars. There’s a clear evolution, a new sophistication. “Generally we've always had a lot of different influences,” Farina said in a 2002 interview. “The easiest thing for us to do at the beginning was to just play the kind of music that was on our first records, but after a while, I think we really wanted to kinda branch out and try to come to terms with other kinds of influences that didn't fit in what you call the ‘post-rock scene’.”
1999’s The Bed Is In The Ocean feels like a moment of actualisation, blending the disparate influences of slowcore, jazz and confessional lyricism. “There Are Ghosts” immediately launches us into Farina’s internal monologue, opening with a vivid sketch of his innermost anxieties:
“So quiet
I can hear that the refrigerator is on
And I can hear the fabric from your sleeping bag
How it sounds against someone else's floor…”
Less than a minute into the record, Farina’s lead guitar slinks through a four-bar phrase, confident and precise. The clear tone cuts like a knife, and throughout the record, this clarity emphasizes the band’s increasingly jazzy repose. “When Karate started, I think we had less confidence. We were really trying to be an indie band, a post-punk band or something,” said Farina in a 2021 interview. “After we made the second record and Eamonn went on to pursue his career as a doctor, we opened up. Gavin, Jeff and I were music students – we studied jazz; we’re formally trained musicians.” There’s a soft parallel to be made between Steely Dan and Karate, with both bands chasing very different shades of refined, audiophilic jazz rock. Farina would release a solo single, “Steely Dan,” the year following TBIITO.
Where Karate had looked to incorporate shades of jazz and blues into their previous records, The Bed Is In The Ocean seems set on centering those influences. The patient wandering of “The Same Stars,” the jazzy progressions that power the frenetic “Diazapam,” and the slick licks that underpin Farina’s ruminations on “The Last Wars” retain the push-pull of their post-rock roots, albeit with emphasis on noodly solos and bluesy licks. “I would have older American music in mind – something from the ‘40s or ‘50s – but then we would punk-ify it, or make it experimental in some way,” said Farina in 2021. “The Bed is in the Ocean is definitely the start of that.”
“Bass Sounds” is an exemplar of the group’s deepening interplay, with Godard’s lumbering bass and McCarthy’s steady drumming spotlit in the instrumental breaks. The moody atmospherics and apocalyptic crescendos of “Not To Call The Police,” the closing track, are Karate at their most beautifully fragmented: Farina’s patchwork of anxiety and fatalism hits like prophetic doomsaying.
Karate, photographed by Brian Sheffield
Unlike the Dan, Karate’s studio obsessions aren’t barrelling towards the apotheosis of something like Gaucho — so slick as to be without purchase — but instead shoot for the most faithful recording of their respective instruments. Whereas Steely Dan, ultimately a sessionist assemblage built around Fagen and Becker, camped out in the studio in an obsessive and borderline antisocial pursuit of perfection, Karate sharpened their steel on the road. "We learn four songs, play them a couple months, then go on tour for a couple months, then learn four more,” said Farina in 2002. “It normally takes about a year to pull it together.”
The studio, no less fastidious, is dedicated to sharpening these performance-ready tracks. “You're talking 15 days and nights to mix and do overdubs,” he said in a 2002 interview. “It's one reason why we have things so worked-out before we enter the studio -- if we didn't, we'd be in there for months.” Even the provision for fits of inspiration is more regimented: “all the guitar solos are improvised,” said Farina in the same interview. “When we recorded [2002’s Some Boots], I did five guitar solos for each song. It's a big part of what we do, but they're also structured -- we know exactly where to start and stop.”
That being said, 2000’s Unsolved found the trio stretching out, luxuriating in pristine production and expansive arrangements. “Small Fires” smolders with striking progressions, and “The Lived-But-Yet-Named” ebbs and flows over an intricate-yet-laidback pocket. “Sever” is Karate’s most palatable rock single, the kind of track that would’ve taken to turn-of-the-century college radio like wildfire, even with a six-minute length that dedicates more than half its runtime to an extended instrumental vamp. “The rain comes down and turns your shine back to rust, yeah / Does that mean that you have to sever us?,” asks Farina on the chorus, the familiar images of traffic and distance illustrating a crumbling relationship.
Most of the songs on Unsolved run long, powered by extended jazzy exploration, felt keenly on the tail of “The Lived-But-Yet-Named.” In a contemporaneous review, Pitchfork contrasted the record to the “harebrained scheme” of The Bed Is In The Ocean with a declarative verdict: “Unsolved is a jazz album.” It lobs criticism — pompous, pedantic, near-parody — but ultimately concedes, “another rewarding and compelling album.”
“As Karate went on, we were less afraid to experiment,” reminisced Farina in a 2021 interview. “Early on, we were part of a variation of indie-rock, but we’d always been the nerdy band. People had an excuse to dislike us.” An increasing appetite for jazz and blues, an obsessive interest in sound equipment, and Farina’s sometimes-highfalutin invocations of figures like Raymond Williams, Miles Davis, and Mark Rothko certainly cultivated a collegiate reputation. Through all these evolutions, the soul of Karate remained intact. “We were influenced by a lot of improvised music, but on the other hand, we would always go back to something loud,” said Farina in 2021. “Unsolved has all these jazz influences, but it also has some songs that, for us, rocked.“
This fusion continued on 2002’s Some Boots, unleashed amidst the ascendent War on Terror. “Original Spies” finds Farina at his most oracular, issuing a call to arms and throwing revolutionary credos between searing guitar passages:
“The demand, the call / It will come soon, I can hear us all / Talking one day about the ones that we love 'stead of / Hanging around waiting for signs from above...”
That’s just the start of it. On “Ice or Ground,” Farina emphatically declares, “let's get something straight: no one did nothing for your freedom,” as incendiary a statement as you’re likely to find in a 2002 rock song. “Now we stroll through American dreams stuck together,” he sings at the close, “but don't you tell me this is something new, because it's not something new.” Farina’s lyrical sketches further evolved alongside the group’s ever-shifting sound, and on Some Boots, those words ebb and flow amongst the hard rock and the steadier roll.
“Remain Relaxed,” far from the rock edge, is Karate’s pass at a classic love song, uncharacteristically forthright yet richly evocative. “About your recent investment plan / It smells like fifty bucks stuffed into a Ziplock bag,” sings Farina on the second verse, the everyday intruding on his romantic woodside scene. An outright confession, “Remain Relaxed” is a tender vignette that prizes the intimacy of connection in the here-and-now, embracing a moment hemmed by imperfections and blemishes.
2004’s Pockets opens on something of a response, as Farina reunites with a bygone lover and finds that the anxieties of yesterday have all but disappeared. The titular sentiment of “With Age” — “you can't give up on the first ones, because the honesty comes with age” — feels like a comment on the group’s own mortality. A decade on from their serrated beginnings, Karate had evolved from New England upstarts to cult jazz-rockers, and Pockets flaunts maturity in both instrumental sophistication and lyrical conviction.
“‘The State I’m In’ Aka ‘Goode Buy From Cobbs Creek Park’,” an upbeat jaunt through suburban Philadelphia, complete with acerbic references to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal — then on death row, now serving a life sentence — and MOVE, a local anarchist group targeted by the Philadelphia Police Department in a destructive 1985 bombing. “Recalls and Armor All / I swear I can see Mumia straight from the Mall,” enunciates Farina with slipped emphasis, “because the Camp Hill Prison doesn't hide its prize / And down in Philly a whole block's on fire.”
On “Cacophony,” a roaring document of mid-2000s alienation, Farina probes the constant climate of manufactured consent. “I'm busy watching TV on my day off / And you might startle me with rational words / Contradicting all the news I've just heard.” The constant din of this modern life, and the search for silence within it, comes to a pointed head with a sharp rhetorical question: “don't you feel like you're being fooled?” Pockets again stresses the gulfs that separate us from one another, whether personal or political. The constant hum of the 24-hour news feed persists throughout, Farina’s disaffection dueling with his steely convictions, which breed both disillusionment and tension. On “Tow Truck,” an anti-immigrant diatribe flames to confrontation:
He said "Boy, you're in my truck
You better watch what you say"
I said "Yeah, do my ideas make you mad?
Well now you know how I´m feeling every day"
The slow-flowing “Water” is a moody quest for connection, which eludes: “how long will it take you to trust me,” asks Farina of his companion as the pair are subsumed by the pouring rain. On “Concrete,” the band’s ultimate closer, the forces of bland urbanization are given insidious life, creeping in on corners and overtaking lively neighborhoods. Fluorescent lights, galvanized steel and parking lots mark the new frontiers of the “peripheral sprawl,” gentrifying communities as they spread unabated throughout America.
It was an America with which Karate had become intimately familiar. “We had done 12 years of playing 75-plus shows each year, and there were the typical pressures that bands experience in that situation,” Farina told Tidal in 2021. Those typical pressures were exacerbated by the onset of Farina’s tinnitus. “I was afraid for my hearing and unsure how to deal with it… I couldn’t sing in tune, and I felt I just couldn’t continue.” After more than a decade together, with six studio albums under their belt, Karate amicably split. “We’ve always been close friends, but I’m sure they needed a break from me and I probably needed a break from them as well,” recalled Farina. “Jeff and Gavin have always been understanding and accepting, so I’m thankful that it ended gracefully.”
Their last release before disbanding, In The Fishtank 12, comprised eight tracks of covers recorded for Konkurrent, a distribution company based in the Netherlands. Tracks by Billie Holiday and The Band share space with versions of Minutemen’s “The Only Minority” and “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs,” Beefeater’s “Need A Job” and Mark Hollis’ “A New Jerusalem.” The latter — the last track on Hollis’ only solo album — seemed an appropriate send off for the trio. It might well have been, were it not for the discovery of a fantastic live recording.
In 2005, hot off the release of Some Boots, Karate embarked on a tour through Europe. Their show in Leuven, a small city east of Brussels, was recorded by a sound engineer and later submitted to the band. This otherwise-unremarkable show that would become 2007’s 595. “We have heard countless live recordings of the 694 shows we played between 1993-2005,” remarked Farina with a typical precision, “but this recording of #595 is surely our favorite.”
‘Unremarkable’ might be some of my own typical imprecision: the album, their first live recording, is an outstanding showing of the band’s well-known live prowess, but it’s plucked from the middle of a European tour. There was no great significance to the date, no deep history with the city, and they played almost 100 more shows before dissolving. 595 is just a band operating at the peak of their power, in a city in Belgium, on a Monday night in May. A clear standout is the sprawling 10-minute rendition of “Caffeine or Me,” a 1995 album track, that fuses early Karate energy with the wandering precision of their later work.
Karate perform in Tempe, Arizona, 1994
Flash or fundamentals?
In their own way, Karate embody both. Their sophisticated arrangements and prodigious playing are hemmed in a relatively barebones sound, one that prizes a crisp and sometimes cold sound over any bombastic embellishments or studio cushioning. For all the ripping guitar solos, dextrous bass and clockwork drums, they’re always angling the sum of their parts — for the most part, a trio — towards something that yet exceeds that grasp. The layers are clear, but I still find new details within the contours, even after countless hours spent combing through their ever-evolving discography. It turns out that flash and fundamentalism don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but instead can exist as interrelated: you could go for style, you could go for substance, but there’s always the option to stun with an approach so dedicated, no bells or whistles could make it any more arresting.
Make It Fit, the band’s reunion record, released in November of last year. An reignition of the spark, the band’s seventh record — their first original studio release in 20 years — is a measured return, coloured by the inevitable passage of time. Farina, Godard and McCarthy are older now, and their new music reflects that age, tempered by both fatherhood and their two decades of lived experience, spent in other bands and configurations. It might not reach the dizzying heights of their most celebrated work, but Karate are chronically under-celebrated, and if their reemergence draws attention to their enviable catalogue, then it’s a victory lap well worth taking.