Baby steps is our “introduction to…” column. Yes, there might be a few Bill Murray fans here. This week’s instalment is courtesy of Simon Roberts. The subject? Read on…
Who are the most underrated band of all time? You could say The Velvet Underground but the legion of bands they inspired and the back payment of praise discounts them. Pavement perhaps? The influence on latter day Blur and the subsequent reformation says they got enough recognition. More obscure then? Six By Seven? A band I loved and they were certainly underrated but they were at least rated by the press for a short while. No, my friends, THE most underrated band of all time is Karate.
Born out of the late-90s Discord scene, this Boston power trio took a traditional format – guitar, bass, drums, vocal – and added a jazz influence which mixed to great effect with their punky Pavement meets Television sounds and over the course of six albums amazed anyone who heard them or saw them live. And yet, this was with little to no airplay and barely a sniff of a review (good or bad). This is what continues to baffle me as they are the kind of band, a cult one admittedly, but a band that should have had some recognition in the press at least.
Geoff Farina is the man behind the group’s sound as it’s his guitar work that truly sets Karate apart from their Alt-rock peers. Like a looser, jazzier Tom Verlaine, he has a unique tone that is at once clean as a whistle but then as dirty as AC/DC when he gives it some welly. The self-titled 1995 début album, it’s follow-up (In Place Of Real Insight) and The Bed Is In The Ocean are ragged post-punk postcards from inner-city USA that have some absolute gems (‘Bad Tattoo’, ‘—’, ‘New Martini’, ‘Diazapam’) but sound like a band just starting out and feeling their way around. They even expanded to a four-piece on In Place Of Real Insight but soon reverted back to the power trio format.
For me, the album where they came into their own was Unsolved (spotify). Opening with two very free-form Jazz rock tracks (‘Small Fires’, ‘The Lived-But-Yet-Named’) is pretty brave but marks the point where Karate set themselves apart from the crowd. Following these loose rambling tracks with an absolute stormer in ‘Sever’, then reminds you that they still know their way around a tune. It’s strong lead lines offset with hard riffing as the song progresses and the lyrical slant of “failed pedestrian dreams” is something that Farina would get stronger and stronger at conveying: ordinary heartbreak and struggle, made to sound like something so epic and important it could change the world.
For the rest of their time together, Karate continued to wow with 2002′s Some Boots, featuring the finest post-break-up-record-collection-split-up song ever in ‘First Release’. A tale of a girlfriend who “always left my singles on the bedroom floor“, having to sell your vinyl to pay the rent and contains a killer line that will resonate with musos everywhere: “I still spin the same sounds for these unsatisfied ears, because there’s always something new to hear…“. This sums up Karate‘s approach well as they took the familiar (rock music, power-trio, break-up songs) and put a refreshing new twist on it (Jazz, grounded imagery, big guitar solos) and while their final album Pockets (spotify) shows that they ran out of steam in the end (not surprising when you got as little recognition as they did), they took their music to the people (post-split live album 595(spotify) cements that) and those who were lucky enough to see them or even just hear one of their albums will bend your ear for hours about that vastly underrated band called Karate. Do yourself a favour and check ‘em out!
It’s a darn shame to see stuff like this happen, but it’s the way life throws curveballs. Leeds based Brew Records are calling it a day after 6 years pulsating loud sounds and 27 releases. Another victim of the 27 club? I personally enjoyed the releases that Brew was creating; amidst an ocean of twee […]
Leeds-based Alaska graced the Bowery stage adorned in all-white. Was it something to do with the twinkling snowscapes of Alaska itself (as a geographer I would have liked to think so), or did they just forget their UV projector? Forgotten disco effects or not, as the set’s big hitting tunes kicked in, Alaska got the […]
It probably was West Side Story‘s visual flair (and the ace Sondheim soundtrack) what really stuck and romanticised the Greaser generation. Much more so than the diluted fluff of Grease or the grim propaganda of 52 miles to hell. The mantle of rockabilly has been revived several times, sometimes unsuccessfully, sometimes quite successfully (see Brian […]
Legal Disclaimer: This is 85% a true story. “Let him loose.” I’m sitting in a cold room and a burlap sack has been removed from my face. Behind two floodlights, two lanky fellas are striking a menacing pose, cracking their knuckles. The silence is deadly and then they put on hunting caps. “So, where’s the […]
“It might be too early for this” I say to a friend whilst opening a Foster’s Ladler (2% ABV, with lemon) with my keys “but I guess it’s an industry thing.” Indeed, we are sitting inside the press area for Live at Leeds 2013, at the basement of the Leeds City Museum. This Press Room […]
It’s weird how life works. The one band that means so much to the book that your life becomes sometimes waxes and wanes in your attention, but when it’s back, it hits hard and fast. In the case of Counting Crows, my interest waned once but when they came back, they never left. Heck, even […]
Interesting name, Xavier. You see, in Spanish (ok, in Mexican Spanish, you pedants), you can say “Xavier” or “Javier” and it will sound the same; the difference is now mostly aesthetic than phonetic. I make this simple but useful note as you’ll need it to understand where this fusion band, called Xavier, is shooting from in […]
Hey, you! Don’t listen to that, listen to this… wait, no, that’s Madness‘ ‘One step beyond’. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Now, what this rambling post is actually aiming for is to invite you to a special gig we have curated with the people of Xray Horse. On May 11th, at […]
I think I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy this pretty nifty band and it’s been a while (2 months) since I’ve written about them. Since the cheque has cleared, I thought about re-posting this video. Just kidding about the cheque. We won’t sell out. Not because of principles, but because nobody wanted to bribe […]
Greetings, readers who appreciated the nods to the classic G.I. Joe* cartoon in G.I. Joe Retaliation! Welcome to another edition of our “reviewing releases late again” single reviews column. In honour to our recent re-obsession with Sigur Ros‘ ( ), we are nicknaming our reviewers after each track. If this doesn’t make sense, then you […]
