Geoff Farina - Karate - Glorytellers

From the very first line of “Gasoline” in 1995, we knew Karate wouldn't be a band like any other. Even though that track recalled Codeine, holding onto the expressiveness and intelligence of Slint and Fugazi, the voice, the lyrics and the guitar style of Geoff Farina, along with the band's rhythm section, always marked the essential difference from everything else. So that dawning cry and the manifesto-track that followed, “If You Can Hold Your Breath”, already tell us, in potential, right from their self-titled debut, what Karate's music would become as an act.

From that moment on, the Boston band delivered a trio of stunning records, starting with the follow-up “In Place Of Real Insight” (Southern, 1997), the band's emotional peak, and “The Bed Is In The Ocean” (Southern, 1998) – with the steady trio lineup of Farina (guitar and vocals), Jeff Goddard (bass) and Gavin McCarthy (drums) – records for which, at the time, they were compared to up-and-coming bands like Van Pelt and American Football.

2000 brings the gloriously imperfect “Unsolved”, a title that already signals an awareness of formal and emotional shortcomings destined to remain unresolved, and of expectations perhaps doomed to go unmet. If “The Bed Is In The Ocean” stands as the most balanced synthesis of every side of Karate (slowcore, post-rock, jazz, blues, prog), the beauty of several songs on “Unsolved” is so dazzling that it lights up the whole album, at times overshadowing the significance of its less powerful passages. 

It opens with a Karate topos, those flames that burned across the cover of the debut album beneath a flying plane, which seems to carry us aloft, satellites dark, alongside William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World” (1991) Wim Wenders. There, as here, the world is relentlessly ablaze, reckoning with the possibility of an ending:

Within the influence of innocence

You were dressed to kill

Pulling styles from the atmosphere

You could have dressed us all

As we surrendered to the worn jets

“Impossible to crash, Impossible to fail”

Like the dim lights on the dash

As we were pulling out of anywhere on any other road

Now I can tell by the way the rain hits the glass

That it wants to be cold

It wants to be snow

Is it falling there

Obscuring small fires

That deign another shining front-page spread

Where old worn men conspire?

So much for Saturdays

And other days when lives are at stake

God forgive us for the hatred

For the risks that we take

Boys forget promises from both coasts

Well, what would it take to get out now?

Is this what they call the end?

Are we sleeping on a dark star?

Is this some saint we all forgot?

Is she burning in a parked car?

Because violence is so, so slow

And the patience will do us in

So mothers stop looking for your sons in the woods

Because you will find them on CNN

That’s when you will try, try

But you can’t evict the sun

It lights up one hour every morning every day

When you know you are the one

The pathos of this opening is tempered by the jazz of “The Lived-But-Yet-Named”, ushered in by a dazzling prog phrasing built over a ragged groove that bridges the two tracks. It's one of those moments that might seem to break the spell of intimacy woven by songs like “Small Fires”, but in truth the very structure of the tracklist is built from a range of emotions describing the experience of living with a sense of precariousness, where the dialogue stays confined within a two-person dimension, measured out between the walls of an apartment:

Hold out, hold out

Because this moon is twice as good

When you see through a year of nights

What you thought you understood

Set out, set out

Because this haze is bound to wane

It can no longer pretend to hide

The will of third-class seats on tomorrow’s trains

The guitar progressions flow, suspended beneath the words, making room for a singable solo that lifts us from the weight of the unspoken. What follows is a pair of songs that somehow mirror the opening two, with one more solid track and one (apparently) lighter one. “Sever” is indeed another gem of the record, a meeting of rock and jazz rendered in perfect Karate style – standing out for its opening electric riff, its bass-and-drum groove, its refrain and its bridge – followed by the apparently carefree jazzy interlude of “The Roots And The Ruins”, with Farina's velvety chords moving over the dynamic structure built by the rhythm section. Farina, alongside other guitarists of his generation from the American underground scene, such as Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Alan Sparhawk (Low), lives within the DIY experience of post-hardcore filtered through musicians from other genres, such as Skip James, Norman Blake and Jimi Hendrix, leaning closer to the style of Bill Frisell than to that of Ian McKaye. “Number Six” and “One Less Blues” are a perfect synthesis of this. The latter represents yet another “Karate” take on a post-rock contaminated by blues and jazz, haunted by the spirit of June of 44, where the words once again open onto a solo, this time made mostly of feedback and unattacked notes:

Confidence, it drops like filth in bathroom stalls

Privacy, it leaks through un-completed walls

Forced by public failures, now you must recall

You have to recall

The times when we became hemmed in by leaden skies

The times when all the back rent closed our zealous eyes

Maybe this is how all young ideas die

But they didn’t have to die

Evidence yields this case a wash

Just give me something that I can touch

To ease the tension comes the songwriting of “The Halo Of The Strange”, where guitar textures weave an unbroken dialogue with and beneath the words, carrying us toward the album's close with two splendid tracks that return to slowcore/post-rock territory without abandoning the record's consolidated jazz vein: “The Angels Just Have To Show” and “This Day Next Year”.

The opening and closing tracks of each Karate record have always been the standout moments of their releases, a constant meditation on the meaning of beginning and ending. With “Unsolved”, this philosophical devotion to circularity – to the beginning that is an ending and the ending that is a beginning – reaches aesthetic perfection with “Small Fires” and “This Day Next Year”, a track whose title is more than emblematic. Within the album, meanwhile, unfolds in its barest intimacy the pursuit of a perfection that can only fail under the weight of a disarming beauty and a human transience deluded by the creed of progress, revealed in a guitar passage, in a dancing figure of drums and bass, in a line sung by Farina: “Beat Down/ the Floor with My Feet 'till You and I Have Time to Be Still”.

“This Day Next Year” closes the album with a perfect synthesis of Karate's jazz-folk-postrock songwriting, in a closing spiral as ecstatic as a Mogwai track and as fragile as one by American Football:

Words are the worst way to say what I have to say

But sometimes you can’t play how you want to play to show it well

And this is one splinter, splinter of a sentence

Both a pain and a pleasure to try to expel, but I have to tell

About the years of influence and artless advice

That can still only escape in a struggling, stilted excuse for a smile

And when you’re parked over on the wrong side of nowhere

No amount off nothing is going to make it worthwhile

A touch, subdivided, rinsed, and sold

Before the hands have a chance to get cold as an eyelash pries an hour from the schedules of the uninvolved

And your sills so-called insulation

Can only sigh at December Sundays, unsolved

So like the transportation of the suns

You must hold steady to the ones who light your mornings, nights, and afternoons

And if you should grow angry with the pace of chance

Don’t be afraid to make some plans for December Sundays soon

Today you missed her getting up, once again

Well boy, you’ve got to listen to me

Promise her you’ll rise this day next year, from this very bed

From this very bed

From this very bed

Today you missed her getting up, once again

Well boy, you’ve got to listen to me

Promise her you’ll rise this day next year, from this very bed

From this very bed

From this very bed

Long accused of coldness and intellectualism, of being too (cool)jazz and not enough (emo)core, of having abandoned its slow attitude in favour of swing, "Unsolved" gives itself over to anguish, joy and anxiety without reservation, without the restraint that had held back its predecessor even in its recording and its distortions. The Karate of "Unsolved" were, back then, a band capable of anything live. Being able to see them perform in those years was a rare and special opportunity: shows that were emo in feeling, post-rock in the senses, progressive in their movements and jazz in their thinking. All of this within the frame of post-hardcore, a genre that "Zen Arcade" (SST, 1984) by Hüsker Dü, "Double Nickels On A Dime" (SST, 1984) by the Minutemen and "Daydream Nation" (Blast First, 1988) by Sonic Youth had already said much about, in terms of both its developments and its implications. It's no coincidence, then, that Karate paid tribute to – and proved capable of doing so – the Minutemen in their instalment of the "In The Fishtank 12" series (Konkurrent, 2005), alongside Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Mark Hollis.

In 2000, the band's stylistic recalibration – confirmed by the subsequent, underrated "Some Boots" (Southern, 2002) and "Pockets" (Southern, 2004) – left fans wrongfooted, given that most of them had been won over by the first three albums. But what is the true lesson of DIY underground culture and post-punk, if not a boundless love of music? Guy Picciotto produces Vic Chesnutt and Xylouris White, the Ex play with Getatchew Mekurya and Brass Unbound, and Messthetics (the trio featuring Joe Lally and Brendan Canty) pay homage to Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman.

From the title onward, "Unsolved" confesses its own fragility and asks the listener for trust: it declares from the outset the impossibility of completeness, ultimately confirming the truth of an (imperfect) paradox of perfection. It's a struggle for form that plays out without ever resolving itself, a declaration of multiformity in which essence and form – more than ever before in the band's discography – overlap. On "Unsolved", in fact, Karate don't sound like one genre or another, like one band or another, like what people want from the band or like something no longer what it used to be. "Unsolved" is also a shared introspection, an attempt to stay together regardless, at least in twos, in a scenario that might not be so far removed from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". Karate thus reveal themselves to be more vulnerable and "unresolved", yet still true to their pursuit.

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19/04/2020