Geoff Farina - Karate - Glorytellers - Toughness from a slow-beating heart

The secret star

The story that interests us begins in Boston in 1988, where Geoff studies songwriting at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, and where it's all too easy to find people wanting to play and start a band. Geoff is the classic jeans-and-t-shirt kid holed up in his bedroom. Here he shuts himself away and studies, plays, creates, repairs damaged amplifiers, immersed in his own fantastical world where music is pretty much everything, the lifeblood that morbidly feeds every aspect of his life. After finishing his studies at Berklee, Farina will go on to take a master's degree at the University of Massachusetts in sound technology, writing a thesis on the history of analog sound synthesis.

In those years Geoff meets the beautiful Jodi Buonanno, a figure who would feature in most of his musical projects. Together they form a duo with a name somewhere between cocky and prophetic, Secret Stars. But Jodi is hardly the only person making music in Boston, and Geoff easily finds himself cultivating numerous other relationships with young musicians. This is how he comes into contact with Gavin McCarthy, a skilled jazz-leaning drummer, and Eamonn Vitt, a bassist and his college roommate.

With them he decides to start a project that's somewhat different and decidedly more ambitious than Secret Stars, choosing as its name the world's most famous martial art. Where the atmosphere with Jodi Bonanno is decidedly minimal, drone-like and relaxed, with sweet, evanescent voices and guitars, Karate draw on what pretty much every young professional musician with a well-rounded love of music does, at least starting out. They play rock, funk and jazz, the way it's classically taught at college. But the limits of faithfully reproducing these genres soon prove too narrow for the three of them once they're outside the classroom. Naturally, they decide to experiment with new frontiers, still playing rock music, but in its most posthumous sense (Codeine and Slint are surely in their ears in those years), fused with simple, classic but rawer jazz and funk inflections, all magically channeled back into the hardcore universe.

The first proper LP release, however, doesn't arrive until 1995. That's when the self-titled Secret Stars comes out on Shrimper Records, already previewed in 1993 and 1994 with two homemade cassette releases. Geoff and Jodi describe the music of Secret Stars as "drones and love songs for late nights". A full 20 tracks that sound like they were written for the 2010s. The man-woman duo verges on bedroom dream-pop, in the vein of Chairlift or Beach House, only stripped of synthetic, artificial sounds and almost entirely built on harmonious, delicate, faint voices over musical beds made solely of arpeggiated electric guitar. Songs mostly sung by Farina and accompanied exclusively by two electric guitars, which overlap and occasionally split apart to create simple, delicate riffs or minimal, unassuming solos. While the album never quite reaches any particular peaks, there's enjoyment to be found in the relaxing listen of tracks like "Vague" and "Alienation #3", though the songs sung by Bonanno are striking too ("Eyelashes", "Hearts Don't Break"), where Jodi's voice is pure molasses dissolving among the notes without needing to raise a fuss. Not to be listened to in the car on long, demanding trips.

The first thing ever recorded with Karate dates back instead to 1994: a single produced by Self Starter Foundation, now a collector's relic, titled "Death Kit/Nerve". Two tracks where the references to Slint's slowcore are plain to hear, with brief funky accelerations only on the second track. Even darker, more post-hardcore atmospheres, but with greater forays into the genres (funk and jazz) that would soon become hallmarks of their sound, can be found in the two following singles, "The Schwinn" (1995) and "Charry Coke" (1996), the first released as a split with "Visit From Mars" by Crownhate Ruin, a brief Dischord-stable flash in the pan, and the second released, again as a split, with "On Let You Go" by Lune (the band of Jeff Goddard, the bassist who would soon officially join Karate).

Karate: the search for a new sound

Also in 1996, Karate manage to land a record deal for the release of their self-titled debut LP. Karate is the album that, in fact, only timidly introduces the sound that would go on to distinctly characterize the band's future output. The sound here is actually rather hard and atonal, with classically post-hardcore tracks ("Trophy", "Bad Tattoo" and "Bodies") alternating with decidedly slowcore moments, which are the album's most thrilling passages (chief among them "Every Sister" and "Caffeine Or Me", with honorable mentions also for "If You Can Hold Your Breath" and "What Is Sleep").

Karate is released on Southern and features technical collaboration from Wally Gagel (Folk Implosion, Eels, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver), who records them at Fort Apache Studios in Boston, and John Loder (Jesus and Mary Chain, Fugazi, Shellac), who masters the album at Abbey Road in London. The sound alternates between slow and fast, but is always raw and melancholic, and that "hey, sugar" shouted at the start of "Gasoline" would soon become the liberating cry of the band's earliest fans at their small but fervently attended live shows. A hardcore fanbase begins to take shape, one that, as Farina himself would later say, wouldn't change much over time, giving the band the sense that they were always playing for the same people, who never missed a live show in the United States, but above all in Europe, where Karate found, if you will, their real success.

Karate, who that same year officially bring Jeff Goddard into the lineup on bass, with the consequent shift of Eamonn Vitt to second guitar, are a band of professional musicians who, unlike the vast majority of acts on the global underground and alternative scene, actually studied music in the places classically devoted to it. The fact that they set about writing and playing music that sits halfway between visceral post-hardcore amateurism and jazz or funk technicality is a product of their training and their brilliant urge to experiment outside the classic rules — or rather, to break them — channeling the classic unease of youth through the medium that comes most naturally to them: hardcore.

Farina, three albums in three different worlds

1997 is probably the most prolific year in Farina's musical career. No fewer than three albums are released: Genealogies with Secret Stars, Usonian Dream Sequence as a solo work under his own name, and In Place Of Real Insight with Karate. A single, "Sanity Assansins", also comes out, again with Secret Stars.

Genealogies carries on, without any great surprises, the path Geoff and Jodi Bonanno set out on with their self-titled 1995 debut. Amplified electric guitar with heavy reverb, often an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, simple and mostly melancholic melodies, with Geoff's solos orbiting somewhere in the blues galaxy. On this album, though, unlike the previous one, there are tracks that manage to rise above the hazy, somewhat intangible mass of the average song, earning the duo some radio play and modest, if unremarkable, album sales. The tracks in question are "Some Sinatra", "Serc", "Back In The Car" and especially "Shoe In", a song Farina would often revisit live and later include on the EP 5 Songs, released under his own name in 2006.

A slightly different case must be made for Geoff Farina's first solo album, Usonian Dream Sequence. Here we're in American country-folk territory, built almost exclusively around an acoustic guitar and his whispered voice, all handled in a very simple, understated way, with brief electric slide guitar inserts, exactly as the rules of the genre demand. Geoff has always nursed a visceral passion for folk, American folk first and foremost, but with ears always attuned to every kind of experience from every corner of the globe. It's no coincidence that he would go on to record no fewer than three albums with our own Ardecore: if it's folk, it certainly won't be the stars-and-stripes kind.

It's undeniable that this album contains songs of real beauty, easily accessible to a wide, non-expert audience ("The United States" and especially the title track). "Usonian Dream Sequence" sounds like an acoustic version of a hypothetical, gorgeous Karate song. The melody is catchy and the arrangements are, at last, rich and carefully crafted. The tempo is very slow, and to anyone unfamiliar with Farina's music it might come across as an anonymous drone. It's therefore advisable, for those with little prior experience, to come back to this record only after becoming sufficiently acquainted with the sounds and voice of Karate. Love will come, even if perhaps not at first listen. Also worth noting is Geoff's emotional commitment on the poignant "The Same Way", the arrangements — at times even fusion-tinged — of "Midlantic Schemes", and the western atmospheres of "Window Seats", which sadly bring down the curtain.

In Place Of Real Insight is what Karate fans have historically come to regard as the Boston band's masterpiece. It's their second LP, just a year on from the debut, but it's a decidedly different beast. The search for a new, distinctive, exclusive sound seems to have finally borne its first fruit. As Farina put it in a 2002 interview with Metrotimes: "We want to use the language available to formally address the music to each other. But, on the other hand, we don't just want to work within those stringent boundaries. We don't want to be a rock or fusion group that pushes clichés. I discover elements that I want, and add them to my acumen, then disregard the rest." This is, in short, Karate's approach to their own music.

With In Place Of Real Insight, people start talking about Karate's music in terms of jazz-inflected alternative rock, of post-rock with funky veins, of an inspired, refined slowcore — all seemingly clashing, contradictory pairings, yet ones that manage, in part, to define the peculiarity of their music and to earn the band exactly what it was deliberately seeking: a singular, well-defined and recognizable sound of its own.

Just listen to the opening track, the enchanting “This, Plus Slow Song”, to understand what we're talking about. Slow tempo, a rhythm section pared down to the bare essentials, and refined seventh-chord electric guitar embroidery, interrupted by brief, more energetic moments. Farina's singing, within the limits of his acknowledged modest melodic gifts, comes across as pleasant, including the perilous high notes pushed right to the edge of his range. This isn't the rule throughout the album, though, since the pattern tends to be a slow track followed by a fast one. When the tempo picks up, Farina's screams double in intensity too, turning meaner and rawer and making the overall atmosphere more punk (“New Martini”, “It's 98 Stop”, “Die, Die”). The main source of inspiration remains the post-hardcore of bands like Fugazi and, above all, Shellac. And yet Karate's sound still manages to stand apart, thanks above all to swirling, fusion-style bass lines, guitars that constantly wink at funk, and Farina's distinctive voice, which can swing from near-desperate screaming to velvety, lullaby-like melodic passages.

The track that perhaps best embodies the jazzcore style as the band itself more or less codified it is “New New”. A guitar intro with jazz chords, a swirling fusion-style bass line, punk/hardcore/oi!-style vocals, all leading into fast, razor-sharp post-hardcore guitar bursts. In short, an encyclopedia of music packed into 2:47.

Still, any look at this album would be pointless without a few words on “Wake Up, Decide”. Strictly from a musical standpoint, it would have to be filed as a classic post-rock track, since it embodies every tenet of the genre, including the absence of vocals. If you had to point to a flaw, it would be its short length, because a track like this shouldn't run less than six minutes. And if you had to pick a time of day to listen to it, it would be deep into the night, ideally in a car, preferably alone.

Also in 1997, Secret Stars released the single “Sanity Assassins”, happily paired with “Truxton Park” by Ida, the New York duo working in a similarly minimal and dreamy vein. The single came out in an extremely limited edition, with handmade sleeves cut from fabric scraps taken from an old dress and sewn onto the covers. “Sanity Assassins” is a slow ballad somewhere between shoegaze and old blues, set in classically hazy, relaxing atmospheres.

At the peak with Karate

This brings us to 1998, the year Karate became a trio again after Eamonn Vitt left to focus fully on his medical studies rather than continue a career in music. But this change did nothing to dent the band's artistic vein. Proof of that is The Bed Is In The Ocean, arguably the masterpiece of the entire Karate/Geoff Farina output. It's the technical and emotional peak, the perfect synthesis and tightrope balance between hardcore spirit and fusion mind. “There Are Ghost”, with that opening “so quiet” that still sends chills down your spine every time, the stylistic virtuosity of “The Same Stars”, the long instrumental finale of “Outside In The Drama” — worthy of a standing ovation and a few tears — and the harrowing, desperate melancholy of the immense closer “Not To Call The Police”. There's no shortage of more forceful, energetic moments, mostly concentrated in the middle and final sections of a few tracks (“Diapazam”, “Up Nights”), but the overall mood is distinctly calmer and more relaxed: this feels like the work of a mature band, one that isn't after shock value through noise or agonizing slowness, but aims straight for the heart (the lyrics are the most carefully crafted and refined of their career) and for the ears of a more demanding audience.

The album's most intense moment comes right in the middle, with “Last Wars”. A slow, jazz-inflected ballad that speaks, obliquely, of wars and genocides. That line, “the bed is in the ocean while guns are on the trains”, would soon become a kind of secret password among the band's fans.

His love for Italy — the land of his ancestors, of his wife, and of the countless artists with whom Geoff would pursue parallel projects throughout his career — often brought him to perform in intimate, carefully chosen settings in the Belpaese. The mini-tour in the winter of 1998 with Jodi Bonanno allowed the two of them, thanks to their many contacts there, to record a two-track single titled “Fourteen Days In Belpaese – November 1998”. The cover features the technical specs of a vintage Vespa 50 Special, all strictly in Italian. The tracks are “RPMs”, sung by Farina, and “Congress”, sung by Bonanno — two tracks that show a clear evolution of the Secret Stars sound toward more complex structures and a more refined musicality.

1998 had actually opened with the release of a single, once again with Karate, containing two tracks, “Operation: Sand” and “Empty There”, a release that effectively marks the start of the partnership with sound engineer and producer Andy Hong, the man behind the scenes on The Bed Is In The Ocean as well. I don't know how deliberate it was, but these two tracks — “Empty There” in particular — seem to form the perfect missing link between the band's decisive, energetic past and the slow, contemplative turn the forthcoming album was about to take.

The new Farina of the 2000s

The end of the millennium passed without any major output from Farina, at least by the pace he'd accustomed us to. There was only time for a compilation of previously released tracks re-recorded in Andy Hong's living room (In My Living Room, 1999), featuring many of his fellow travelers from these years (not just Karate, but also Jodi Bonanno and Ida), and for the release of a solo single (“Steely Dan”). Clearly something bigger was brewing, something that needed more time to come together.

In 2000, Unsolved was released, the most technical, most academic album of Karate's career. Virtuoso flourishes and musical quotations abound, and while the band remains almost entirely within the fusion orbit, with detours into funk (“The Roots And The Ruins”, “The Halo Of The Strange”), pure jazz (“Number Six”), and blues filtered through a post-rock rhythm (“One Less Blues”), there are repeated moments where it feels like you're listening to a live recording of a band showing off its chops as class valedictorians in rehearsal. It's an album that hits the head before the heart. A flawless album, but a cold one in its obsessive attention to sonic detail, more concerned with technical display and the execution of set patterns than with more romantic experimentation. Still, it's an album that leaves a strongly positive impression and could be listened to on repeat for days, especially as background music — though you'd risk mistaking it for the work of just about any other band making excellent, conventional music.

Special mention, an honorable one, goes to “Sever”, the one track you can be sure you've never really heard before, which partly revives the more forceful style of the band's early work, and to “Small Fires”, opened by a full minute of simply goosebump-inducing guitar solo.

In short, Unsolved is the album where the band's energy and personality give way to a deep passion for Music with a capital M.

Following the release of this LP, fans of the band staged something close to a full-blown revolt, complaining about the poor audio quality of the vinyl pressing. The band and the label acknowledged the problem, and the following year reissued the album as a double LP, with the tracks from Unsolved spread across three sides, and the fourth side devoted to the band's now out-of-print singles. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Also in 2001, Geoff released the solo album Reverse Eclipse. While Usonian Dream Sequence had been a voice-and-acoustic-guitar record largely rooted in country-folk, this second solo outing keeps the same exclusive voice/guitar pairing (now electric, though), but leans this time more toward the worlds of jazz and bossa nova. It almost sounds like a solo transposition of the same artistic vein found on Unsolved. Plenty of technique, virtuosity and references (Pat Metheny above all) make for a thoroughly enjoyable journey, caressed by the warm, delicate notes of his guitars and by his voice, which, though noticeably improved over the years, remains fairly amateurish — and all the more distinctive for it. The album's only guest is Josh Larue, another brilliant guitarist, who trades licks with Geoff on excellent tracks like "The Left-Handed Way", "Pordenone Plaster" (very bossa nova, and likely a tribute to his wife's hometown), "Soon In Tents" and "One Percent". Josh Larue would later join Farina, along with other musicians, in a future project, Glorytellers.

It's hard to single out better or worse tracks on this album. Everything is technically flawless, but nothing hints at a distinctive artistic vein that might get you excited. "Fixable", the closing track, stands out from the rest for its dark, melancholy streak and for finally breaking free of the otherwise omnipresent rigid patterns and clichés found across the record. Otherwise, this is an album for true devotees only.

Geoff was therefore increasingly focused on honing his skills as a guitarist. This was confirmed in 2002 by a new album under his own name, Blobscape (2002, Kimchee Records), featuring 16 guitar improvisations selected from 100 recorded at his Narragansett Grange Hall (a disused space he brought back to life to host artistic and cultural events). Pitchfork famously slapped it with a resounding "1.0", citing a suffocating artistic aridity set against technique that wasn't even all that "incredible" in the virtuoso flourishes Geoff shows off. Either way, it's hard to grasp the need for an album like this: a collector's item, for blind fans or guitar students preparing to turn the instrument into an obsessive reason for living — not for anyone else.

Also in 2002, Karate released a new single on Southern, "Cancel/Sing". Two tracks for over half an hour of music. "Cancel" brings back the slow-tempo jazz feel that had been partly lost on the previous Unsolved. We hear dirtier, more distorted guitar solos again, and the bass carries a single simple, steady cadence for nearly all eleven minutes. The drums take center stage around the halfway mark, launching into a passionate solo digression. The finale is given over to psychedelic atmospheres and avant-garde structures unlike anything heard before in their career. "Sing", on the other hand, starts from improvised jazz — largely schizophrenic and deconstructed — before shifting into long stretches of near-progressive rock. Fifteen minutes that represent the most complex, least immediate moment in the Boston trio's creative output, but which, from an artistic and emotional standpoint, mark one of the high points of their career. "Sing" is Karate's definitive masterpiece, as well as one of the most beautiful and intense episodes in the last 20 years of rock music.

It's the last peak before the slow decline toward the end of the adventure.

Karate also had a new album in the works, and a few months later, still in 2002, Some Boots was released, their fifth LP. It's a decidedly different album from Unsolved, built on the idea of experimenting across the board, drawing on the most disparate genres and reshaping them in their own image. There's everything from the reggae scents of "First Release" to the slowed-down funk of "Original Spies" and "Airport", from the blues-rock of "Ice Or Ground" to the gorgeous, moving slow-fusion of "South" and "Corduroy", the best tracks on the album. There's no shortage either of harder, more schizophrenic moments — call it jazzcore ("In Hundreds", "Baby Teeth") — but the restlessness of their early years is by now a distant memory.

A solid album, which, taken together with the "Cancel/Sing" single released shortly before, gave the band another thrilling moment — the last one before the tragic end of their career.

In 2002 the trio still played several dates in their beloved Italy. One show in particular, at the Barchessone Vecchio in Mirandola, in the province of Modena, yielded an EP (Concert at Barchessone Vecchio), released the following year, again on Southern. Most of the tracks come from Unsolved, with the exception of "There Are Ghosts" (The Bed Is On The Ocean) and "If You Can Hold Your Breath" (Karate). The peculiar acoustics of this old former horse shelter — now half-destroyed by the earthquake that struck the area hard — give the tracks a distinctively round, clean sound, fueled by the warmth and involvement of the audience. Worth noting is the extraordinary version of "Number Six", featuring a masterful baritone sax performance by the talented Luca Mai, the unhinged horn of Zu.

The last Karate records and the sudden illness

After the release of the EP Concert at Barchessone Vecchio (2003), the three of them made and released, the following year, Pockets, Karate's final studio album. Recorded by Andy Hong in Cambridge, it features guitar contributions on two tracks ("Cacophony" and "Concrete") from Chris Brokaw, former drummer of Codeine and Come and a close friend of Geoff's since college.

Pockets is an album with a sad, melancholy streak. The melodies are among the simplest and most direct of their career, and they carry a weight of emotion and negativity that almost seems to communicate Farina and co.'s premonition about the end of their glorious journey together. The jazz influences are far less present than in the recent past, giving way to questionable Red Hot Chili Peppers-style funk moments ("The State I'm In"), to pure Cranberries-esque pop-rock episodes ("Cacophony"), and in general to a noticeable lack of interesting ideas. The only tracks that manage to stick in your ears for a while are "With Age" and "Water" (the latter leaning quite close to Low territory).

Pockets is certainly the least thrilling moment in Karate's career.

In those years, though, the real problems lay elsewhere. Something in Geoff was no longer working as it used to, and it soon became clear to everyone. Recordings and live shows were often interrupted, all because of terrible whistling and buzzing sounds Farina kept hearing in his ears. They were difficult, dramatic times, culminating in a diagnosis of a hearing disorder (tinnitus) that forced Geoff to permanently turn down his amplifiers and abandon a kind of music that can't do without distortion and the heavy pulse of bass and drums. In short, it forced him to disband Karate, once and for all, with no possibility of appeal.

The following year (2005) there was only time for the release of In The Fishtank 12, the twelfth chapter of the ambitious project developed by the Dutch label Koncurrent, which gives bands like NoMeansNo, Low, Tortoise, June of '44, Sonic Youth, Motorpsycho and others the chance to do whatever they want in a recording studio placed entirely at their disposal for two days. Over the years, the series would eventually total 15 fishtanks. Into Karate's own fishtank went covers of artists who had shaped their lives and careers over the years. All of it reinterpreted and reworked into their own recognizable sound, with further experimentation never heard from them before.

And so Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" gets pulled off the gramophone, turning into a powerful swing number, slightly faster than the original, with Geoff's electric guitar standing in for the piano. Minutemen's "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" and "This Ain't No Picnic" are rendered in versions very close to the originals, with an unusual, brisk verve rarely heard from this band in any other instance. Bob Dylan's "Tears Of Rage", the best-realized experiment of the bunch, becomes a poignant, moving hymn to music that, for this writer, effectively stands as a fitting closing theme to the wonderful, unrepeatable eleven-year film that was Karate.

Only the wonderfully pleasant discovery of a recording, made by some loyal sound engineers, of one of their 2003 live shows — the 595th of their career (though many more would follow), this one in Leuven, Belgium — would make it possible to release a new album in 2008, their first live record (unless you count the EP recorded at Barchessone Vecchio), and the last to bear the name Karate (595).

It's a strange feeling to listen to a live Karate album, especially one arriving three years after the band's breakup. Over the years, they had turned the recording studio into a kind of live venue without an audience, a place to faithfully capture every natural nuance of their slow, powerful, measured and never-artificial sound. Strip away the slight reverb from the venue's surround effect, the audience applause and Geoff's thank-yous at the end of each song, and this could easily pass for one of their studio albums, given how masterfully the trio reproduce every passage of the original versions with scientific precision.

As with Concert at Barchessone Vecchio, the songs are drawn mostly from Unsolved, the album they were touring that year. From The Bed Is On The Ocean they revisit the immense "There Are Ghosts," sung by Farina in a more frantic way, almost like a rapid-fire hip-hop rhyme, punctuated by his superlative solos complete with high-school-style whistles, as if we were at a Satriani G3 show. From Karate comes a fabulous version of "Caffeine Or Me," twice as long as the original, making room for the kind of psychedelic indulgences already savored on Cancel/Sing.

A necessary album, especially for anyone unlucky enough never to have caught one of their live shows.

Farina after Karate: collaborations and new projects

Geoff Farina can hardly be accused of sitting around doing nothing over the years. While his hearing problems forced him to close the door on a certain kind of music, that didn't stop him from continuing to express himself through new stylistic registers and forms. Geoff went on to write film scores, contribute to various cultural projects, and above all forge a host of new collaborations with other musicians, which more often than not resulted in album releases. It would be impossible to give a thorough account of every single activity the former Karate frontman has undertaken since the band's split. We'll limit ourselves to flagging the most convincing and/or original works.

Farina has continued to release work under his own name, notably two EPs, 5 Songs and Already Told You, both from 2006, and an album released in 2012, The Wishes Of The Dead. These are very stripped-back affairs, built around an increasingly refined vocal melody and (apparently) simple accompaniment with just guitar, mostly arpeggiated. For more complex material, you have to look to work where his name doesn't appear solo on the cover, or where it's paired with those of his collaborators, as in the purely (free) jazz moments of New Salt (2005), where he's joined by Luther Gray III on drums and Dan Littleton on second guitar, or in Almanac (2006), again backed by Luther Gray III along with Nate McBride on double bass. The latter in particular, the fourth volume in Atavistic's "Out Trios" series — the label that gave a number of jazz-leaning artists the chance to express themselves freely and experimentally — is a work of unquestionable merit, with tracks like "Breccia," "Hello Tamarat, Goodbye" (where there's even a hint of distortion in Farina's guitar) and "Leone" that genre enthusiasts will surely appreciate.

But over these years Farina has above all deepened his ties with Italy, his second homeland (besides having a wife who is thoroughly Italian, his great-grandparents were from Palermo and L'Aquila), both in terms of artistic collaborations and purely recreational moments.

Farina reckons he's performed more than a thousand times over the course of his career, on stages all over the globe. The magical 2002 tour, as mentioned, captured in two gems (Concert at Barchessone Vecchio and 595), saw Karate share the stage on numerous occasions with Zu, the dazzling Rome-based punk/noise-jazz trio, with the respective live shows opened and closed by traditional Roman songs performed by Giampaolo Felici with his Blind Loving Power. Farina and the others (Felici and Pupillo in particular) thoroughly enjoyed the convivial spirit that came out of those moments, to the point of toying with the idea of doing something together along those lines — something that would resurrect Rome's popular folk tradition, by then relegated to the city's old and new outlying neighborhoods and the memories of elderly Trastevere residents, and bring it back to life in a new guise: harder-edged, yet still thoroughly "de core."

Ardecore — covered in a separate feature — would go on to release three albums over the years (the self-titled debut in 2005, "Chimera" in 2007, and "San Cadoco" in 2009) featuring Farina on guitar, mixing original songs with reinterpretations of classics from the Roman tradition, and becoming a cult band and a point of reference — even beyond Rome's ring road — in the movement reinterpreting Italian folk tradition through a modern lens.

During one of his long stays in the Dolomites, meanwhile, the story goes that Farina conceived, together with his friend and drummer Luther Gray III, a project leaning more toward folk-blues and the melodic sensibility of certain American singer-songwriter ballads, something he had in fact already explored on his own on Usonian Dream Sequence.

To satisfy this further urge, the Glorytellers project was born. The first record (the self-titled Glorytellers), released in 2008, features, alongside Luther Gray III on drums, Josh Larue (guitar) and Jeffrey Charland (bass). The second attempt (Atone) came out in 2009 with a new lineup of collaborators: Mike Castellana (guitar), Gavin McCarthy (Karate's drummer) and our own Marco Buccelli (who filled in on drums for his American colleagues on the subsequent American and European tour).

Broadly speaking, the Glorytellers project is a continuation of the very simple but deeply felt path Farina began with his first solo productions. New songs with an old-fashioned flavor, classic ballads straight out of the best American folk-country tradition, where only rarely does something less predictable emerge (for instance, the sonic somersaults of "Awake At The Wheel" from Glorytellers, or the sparkling, unexpected rowdy streak of "The Lost Half Mile" and "Blue Bag" from Atone).

Again with Massimo Pupillo, the bassist of Zu (and a galaxy of other projects), Farina made a new album, somewhere between free jazz and noise avant-garde, titled Still Life With Commercials (2008). The project also features Michael Zerang (Brotzman Tentet), a veteran drummer of the North American avant scene. A record for schizophrenic minds and lovers of deconstructed improvisation, relentless yet technically flawless. A small gem, released only in a limited CD edition, but one that any fan of the genre should track down. Three virtuosos who together strike sparks of pure pleasure for ears ready to receive them.

With Chris Brokaw (the former drummer of Codeine, who had already appeared on Karate's Pockets), Farina released two albums, The Boarder's Door (2010) and The Angel's Message To Me (2011), on which the two, both on guitar, play what they themselves describe as "a collection of pre-WWII blues, rags, and spirituals." A reinterpretation of classics from the American blues, folk and gospel tradition, from Fred Cockerham to Elizabeth Cotten, albeit with a pace and attitude that retain only the faintest memory of the old original melodies. There are also original songs, performed solo, alternately, by the two, among which the superb "Criminals," handled by Brokaw, stands out.

The Chicago guitarist, however, is not one to sit still, and so in early 2013 he teamed up with drummer John Dugan (Chisel, Edsel) and bassist Pete Croke (Brokeback, Tight Phantoms) to form Exit Verse, who make their debut with this release.

In the arc of Farina's discography, this latest effort leans more toward the traditional vein typical of Glorytellers than toward the experimental side of Karate. Indeed, the 9 songs draw their essence mainly from rock and roll (which finds its fullest expression in "Perfect Hair", a track that recalls the early Who), played with a crosscutting vision that moves through territory belonging now to hard rock, as on "Silver Stars" and "Sparrows", now to the blues influences of "Seeds". The cross-pollination, though, is marginal, confined to brief departures that act more as embellishment than as a load-bearing pillar. The sound is very direct, with an almost power-pop attitude perceptible, for instance on "Fiddle & Flame", whose drum intro closely echoes that of the Knack's "My Sharona".

The whole record rests mainly on Croke's powerful bass line, which does its job superbly, laying down a clean foundation on which to build the entire harmony. Farina's guitar, by contrast, mostly sticks to rhythmic riffing, occasionally slipping outside the song form with elegant solos laid over a static rhythm, as in the closing section of "Chrome", probably the album's finest track. Those riffs, though, are more or less all alike, as is the drumming, which never really sparkles with imagination across the record.

"Exit Verse" certainly makes classicism its strength, sticking to those conventions as closely as possible and straying from them only rarely. It's an enjoyable record, but also a monotonous one, liable to wear out the listener before long. It might work better as a road-trip soundtrack, or as background music while doing something else, than as something for focused, attentive listening. It remains a band made up of extraordinary musicians, but one from whom — precisely for that reason — a little more could have been expected.

Geoff Farina still plays and tours the world with his various musical projects today. He is also a university lecturer, teaching music history at DePaul University in Chicago, the city where he has lived for years. He has written about music for several trade publications and owns a remarkable guitar collection, part of which is also displayed on his website. Geoff Farina loves music like few others do, and few love him as much as he deserves. Those few, however, are very lucky people.

Karate's Return

In July 2022, Karate unexpectedly returned after 17 years with a tour that, following two American dates, landed in Europe starting in Bologna. Two further years on, completing the reunion, came Make It Fit, a new album of original material picking up a thread that had been interrupted — partly due to Geoff Farina's hearing problems — since the release of Pockets. And it's precisely from the more melodic, partially normalized sound of that last album that the trio picks back up, mindful of everything that made them unique.

It takes just a few riffs and the opening of the vocals to find yourself back on more-than-familiar ground, delivered with an immediacy more pronounced than ever. "Defendants"-"Bleach The Scene"-"Cannibals" is a catchy pop-rock triplet that sticks in your ears with no escape, but it's only when certain shades balanced between math-rock and emo return that the sound shines through with real force again. The deep bass and jazzy guitar of "Around The Dial", the Clash/Fugazi crossover of "Rattle The Pipes" are, not by chance, the record's best moments, the ones where the band's trademark sound briefly returns to the glories of masterpieces such as The Bed Is In The Ocean and the splendid Unsolved. The same holds true when the tempo slows down: the quality is always there, but certain peaks are only reached in the slowcore drift of "Fall To Grace" and in the closing intimacy of "Silence, Sound".

Even if somewhat blunted by a less jagged approach and particularly straightforward songwriting, Farina and co. prove fully true to themselves — including and especially in lyrics centered on the contemporary social spectrum — justifying a return that is, in any case, inspired, one which it's worth hoping can serve as a springboard to regain momentum and recapture the fullness of their best days.

Contributions: Alessandro Fiorito ("Exit Verse"), Peppe Trotta ("Make It Fit")

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