Beloved Genre-Benders Karate Make a Fitting Comeback

If you're 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 Karate's Dark Age

From 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 Karate's breakup, the band's 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 wouldn't release the masters. "It was a good decade where you couldn't get our music," says Farina. "It was upsetting."

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 fan's mind: "Why isn't 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 band's albums in physical and streaming formats, to widespread critical acclaim. "It's 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 Karate's 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 they've made persuasively since their early days playing Boston clubs and colleges: "We always sound like Karate, no matter what we do," as Farina says.

There's 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. It's 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.

"We'll 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 what's interesting to us musically at the time. When I write songs . . . if something feels right when I play it and sing it, then it doesn't matter what the genre is. I just try to make it work."

The State of the Guitar Solo

One 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 band's 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 "it's just been something I've always tried to do—in some ways, I think, inappropriately, in some songs or some records. . . . It's 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 we're always playing together."

Boston Beginnings

While Farina isn't clear where Karate's reunion will lead—"we're just doing it year by year"—he still recalls fondly where his musical career really kicked off. Surprise: It's Berklee. "It was such a great time," he says. "I still think about arriving in Boston in 1988." He fell into the city's 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. It's 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 instructors."

Hence the buckling down in the library, studying Coltrane solos. "That was a time where I just practiced a lot, and worked really hard on harmony, and I learned to read and write music better," says Farina, who majored in songwriting. "Berklee really turned me into a serious musician."