Beloved Genre-Benders Karate Make a Fitting Comeback Its one of the decades feel-good music stories: How the legendary alumni acts rediscovery led to rereleases, live reunions, a great new album, Make It Fit.
By
John Mirisola
October 24, 2024
Left to right: Geoff Farina, Jeff Goddard, and Gavin McCarthy of Karate
Image courtesy of Shawn Brackbill / shawnbrackbill.com
If youre looking for one of the feel-good music stories of the 2020s, consider the unlikely reappearance of legendary jazz-punk pioneers Karate some two decades after the band called it quits.
Lost, Found: A Brief History of Karates Dark AgeFrom 1993 until their breakup in 2004, Karate, led by guitarist and singer Geoff Farina BM '91, cultivated a sound that was completely its own. The band floated across the borders of indie rock, punk, jazz, and all their interrelated subgenres-emo, slowcore, post-rock, and so on. Along the way it amassed a loyal league of fans from all of those camps and from adventurous listeners everywhere in between.
But in the years since Karates breakup, the bands music really did become the stuff of legend. Its label neglected its catalog, let the releases fall out of print, failed to make the albums available on most streaming services, and wouldnt release the masters. It was a good decade where you couldnt get our music, says Farina. It was upsetting.
Listen to the first track from Karates 1998 release, The Bed Is in the Ocean.
Through those years, those who knew about Karate, well, they knew. Everybody else never had the chance. Until, as this century seems to go: the internet got involved. But in this narrow case, that was a good thing.
Whatever happens on the internet happened to us, Farina says, and people got more and more interested in our records.
Then in the fall of 2020, an article in the Chicago Reader asked the question on every Karate fans mind: Why isnt anyone reissuing Karate records?
Ken [Shipley] from Numero [Group] saw that, and called me, and all this kind of happened, Farina says. Over the next few years, prestige archival record label the Numero Group rereleased all six of the bands albums in physical and streaming formats, to widespread critical acclaim. Its been a little bit of a vindication, says Farina, to see so many old fans reconnect with these albums, and to see their music connect with new audiences.
Whatever the Style, Karate Make It Fit
The rereleases led to a reunion tour in 2022 with Karates long-time lineup of Farina, bassist Jeff Goddard '88, and drummer Gavin McCarthy BM '02. More shows and festival dates followed in the years since. All of this led, this October, to their first new album in 20 years, Make It Fit, on which they drive home a point theyve made persuasively since their early days playing Boston clubs and colleges: We always sound like Karate, no matter what we do, as Farina says.
Theres a timeless quality to these new songs. You can still hear the DIY punk and indie influences that have been with the band since its inception, but these touch-points are mixed liberally with echoes of everything from the literate pub rock of Elvis Costello to vocal jazz balladry, to Thin Lizzy, to midcentury rock n roll, plus dozens of others. Its the logical next step for a band that left genre distinctions behind somewhere in the mid-nineties, then took a 20-year beat, but never stopped digging through record crates for new sounds to inspire them.
Well try anything, says Farina, who also teaches courses on songwriting and music history at DePaul University in Chicago, and whose other musical projects range from jazz to Americana to Italian folk-punk. We just sort of do whats interesting to us musically at the time. When I write songs . . . if something feels right when I play it and sing it, then it doesnt matter what the genre is. I just try to make it work.
The State of the Guitar SoloOne distinctive through-line in that omnivorous Karate sound: the guitar solos. This might seem natural for a Berklee-trained musician who spent his weekends in the library . . . trying to transcribe Coltrane solos. But taking a solo was a transgressive impulse within the scenes that Karate frequented. Almost all of the bands we were peers with in the '90s were not into guitar solos, Farina says.
Those solos, often the clearest line you can trace back to the bands affection for jazz, have set the band apart even as the State of the Guitar Solo has waned and waxed in rock music.
Farina admits, with something of a wink, that its just been something Ive always tried to do-in some ways, I think, inappropriately, in some songs or some records. . . . Its kind of a challenge I put in front of myself-doing something besides singing and just playing rhythm guitar. But he adds that on Make It Fit, they made an extra effort to coordinate the band more closely during those sections: I really tried to make it sound as if were always playing together.
Guitar Playing Styles to Explore and Master
From classical and jazz to hard rock and the avant-garde, take a tour of the instrument's near-limitless potential.
Boston BeginningsWhile Farina isnt clear where Karates reunion will lead-were just doing it year by year-he still recalls fondly where his musical career really kicked off. Surprise: Its Berklee. It was such a great time, he says. I still think about arriving in Boston in 1988. He fell into the citys indie scene, going to shows at the Middle East and the Rathskeller-an iconic venue that closed in 1997-and frequenting the numerous record shops and music stores surrounding campus in those days. Its this Boston indie scene that Karate would step into in the '90s.
But just as importantly, Farina says, was arriving at Berklee and understanding how terrible a musician I was. He was stunned by his classmates musical skills and the skills of my instruct
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Beloved Genre-Benders Karate Make a Fitting Comeback Its one of the decades feel-good music stories: How the legendary alumni acts rediscovery led to rereleases, live reunions, a great new album, Make It Fit.
