Karate Display Their Chops
By Max Willens

Last Saturday on the ’Sco’s sparsely populated dance floor, there was a vague uncertainty hanging in the air.
The tandem of Spy vs. Spy and Karate was due to start at any moment, but most people in the audience seemed to have shown up in the spirit of exploring new musical territory, rather than to show their support for the local and Bostonian trios, respectively, and the small turnout had made the natives restless. And while headlining act Karate managed to melt some of the audience’s uncertainty away with a tightly performed, skillful set, the spirit of experimentation remained in music that seems about an album away from cross-genre powerhouse instead of the jazz-emo Pasticcio it is now.
Karate clearly take performance very seriously. Except for introductions and a distracted explanation of their closing song, lead singer and guitarist Geoff Farina, bassist Jeffrey Goddard and drummer Gavin McCarthy were there to let their instruments do the talking. Through their exceptionally tight 11 song set, that was all the band offered —straight, undiluted performance. Each man seemingly stood on an island on stage, thoroughly engrossed in his part. But what Karate lacked in stage charisma and chemistry, they paid back in sonic spades.
Everything sounded impeccably rehearsed and arranged; McCarthy and Goddard anchored together into the tightest of rhythm sections and Farina kept things sharp and clean both vocally and on the guitar. Each song in the set sounded just as well-prepared as the last.
At times though, said preparation did not come without cost. Farina and Goddard frequently had to change their tuning schemes and adjust their levels, causing lengthy delays between songs. In the end though, the clarity of each note wound up being worth these delays.
Both live and on Karate’s sixth album, Some Boots, the trio’s overriding goal was to bridge the daunting gap between emo rock and jazz and blues, and throughout the set they did a surprisingly good job by blending work from previous albums in with their newer material.
When the band kept things low key, it usually worked. On “Ice or Ground,” which came right in the middle of their set, Farina did a decent job of mixing the three elements smoothly, with lots of attack on his pretty, if somewhat unoriginal, solos. Also, on “South,” a very sedated inner-city ode, a jazz guitar lick and an emo-style crescendo mingled side by side with startling ease.
Only when Farina and company attempted to kick things up a notch, like on “Original Spies” and “In Hundreds” did things begin to get rocky. Farina is obviously comfortable with an axe, but jazz guitar — at its best — is a power tool, and Farina hasn’t quite figured out how to harness that power yet. His solos sounded borrowed much of the time and while they weren’t lengthy enough to detract too much from the songs overall, they were disappointing.
The musical prowess Karate displayed on stage proved that they are musically competent enough to forge a stronger bond between their genres of choice. The fact that they managed to link them at all (Jazz and emo? Who knew?) is encouraging. That said, they still have some loose ends to tie up. But by the time their next record comes out, the odds are good that we will be far, far luckier to have them back to the ’Sco a second time.