Some Boots, by Karate

Some Boots

by Karate

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BC After falling completely in love with Unsolved I heard this. It's not bad either. Whta a band. Favorite track: First Release.

World of Echo This is even better than I remembered! Indie-jazz-rock that sounds even better twenty years later, perhaps?

Admo Pairing some of their most frenetic and gentlest songs, "Some Boots" further solidified Karate's status as one of the most unique and ideologically independent bands in "capital-i" Indie Rock, charting their own path further from anything resembling the mainstream. Favorite track: Ice Or Ground.

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$7 USD

1.	Original Spies 06:38	buy track
2.	First Release 07:43	buy track
3.	Ice Or Ground 06:17	buy track
4.	South 07:46	buy track
5.	In Hundreds 07:11	buy track
6.	Airport 04:43	buy track
7.	Baby Teeth 05:48	buy track
8.	Corduroy 08:44	buy track
9.	Remain Relaxed 03:11	buy track

about

The three musicians in Karate put together a puzzling thing. A ’90s punk band with an inimitable grasp of jazz, they stood out in a scene that made neophyte musicianship a badge of honor; Karate also helmed an understated mastery of slowcore that could shift the air around listeners and made each band member seem at least a few decades older than their driver’s licenses would indicate. Their stylistic twists and turns eluded definition for years, breeding the kind of talmudic reverence in listeners that’d result in building allegories out of the most minor of details. No doubt Karate superfans tried to find meaning in the number nine—that’s how many songs filled out every album the band issued. But it’s just about the only aspect of the group’s career that could be called routine.

Nine years after recording their very first demo, Karate dropped 2002’s Some Boots, an album whose Frankenstinian indie-rock sort of resembles all the other Karate records that came before it, in so far as the band hardly sounds like the same unit on any of the other LPs even as they carry their sonic touchstones into a new space. Yes, the DNA is there—Jeff Goddard’s fluttery and fluid bass, Gavin McCarthy’s tamed-wilderness drums, and Geoff Farina’s prospecting guitars and cordial vocals. On Some Boots, Karate further plumb the depths of their omnidirectional musical explorations, dolled out in measures equal parts restrained and frenzied. Here’s a band unafraid of making unusual deviations into pleather jazz guitars that spark frisson with syncopated rhythms, a notion so far gone from their punk roots that simultaneously represents the brazen spirit of the scene they came from. Karate sound more at ease in the churning waters of their inventive style on Some Boots than ever before. All the sweat and soul they poured into these complicated twists and turns illuminate the teeniest details of their songs. A skittering drum beat skimming across the midway point of the ever-twisting “In Hundreds” electrifies like a defibrillator paddle, and the gentle shifts in Farina’s lilting voice as he considers the stains of fast-changing seasons on “Corduroy” echo long after the band moves in another direction. Every musical choice works to deepen the pensiveness in Farina’s impressionistic lyrics, and Karate pull off these emotionally complex explorations of the nature of aging because of all the time they spent working together.

credits

released July 30, 2021

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about

Karate Boston, Massachusetts

shows

Aug 18

Cine Joia

São Paulo, Brazil
Dec 16

The Fleece

Bristol, UK
Dec 17

Rescue Rooms

Nottingham, UK
Dec 18

King Tuts Wah Wah Hut

Glasgow, UK
Dec 19

Brudenell Social Club

Leeds, UK
Dec 20

The Garage

London, UK

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