Karate
595

Do they still exist? After their five hundred ninety-fifth concert in Belgium, captured here, the fate of Geoff Farina's band remains unresolved. "595" is a live album released in 2007 but dating back to 2003, a happy setlist faithfully reproducing the outcomes of a special evening. Perhaps the farewell to the stage of one of the most underrated bands of the last three decades, to which I want to pay heartfelt homage with this humble piece of mine. Before you sigh and look away from the screen - mocking yet another apologia sketched by a lunchtime enthusiast - let me explain and introduce you.

Details have always been important to me. Through them, belonging shines. In them, attitude hides. And the aesthetics of Karate (where aesthetics is meant as form since substance in rock is now a matter of anthological times past) has always fascinated me: it resolves in the exquisitely understated allure of the protagonists and in the design that envelops the media, minimalist and hyperrealist at the same time, monochrome where buildings, airplanes, cars rise each time, a sort of two-dimensional pop-up emblematic of a metropolitan Babel engaged in a troubled forced coexistence.

It resolves in the quintessentially rock lineup (guitar, bass, drums) which in their case - a case more unique than rare -  results as a sign of  an unsuspected and elegant flexibility, capable of a musical offering able to relieve the daily troubles sung by Geoff in daring jazz and blues metrics,  listening to "595," you have the impression that post-rock and Lo-Fi are just bubbles of literary speculation, that the rock verb is still and at its best expressed through the right chords, the brush contrapuntal, the skillful clusters of bass, the solos on the edge of prog.

Geoff's narrating voice - live even more tormented than in the studio - reveals in the robust and graceless timbre a heartfelt anguish for his country's fate; when he eases the invective, when he lets the confessions fade to rest his eyes on the wood, it is his guitar that electrifies the abraded velvet woven by Gavin McCarthy and Jeff Goddard,  causing sensory vertigo from deep within the urban imagery, capable of ensnaring us with the warmth of the valves and the combustion of a blend of styles unaccustomed for effectiveness and refinement. If you really want me to draw parallels for you, Karate's swing might remind you of less sedated Spain or, if you prefer,  boned The Sea and Cake; yet I realize that even the noble comparison does not do justice to the sound of the Boston trio.

Don't ask me how all this cannot seem dated and obsolete. How it could still work. I am the first to be bewildered: knowing the ingredients but not the recipe does not help, quite the opposite. Perhaps their formula lies in a genuine expressive urgency, bolstered by technical skills never flaunted, disguised by those who know well that a concert, even the best, perhaps even the last, is nothing but an electric parenthesis between the words "Birth school work death" (...forgive the daring pun between Cyrano and Godfathers...). Or maybe it's just that in Karate I recognized a valid weapon of defense against all the ephemeral promises of all the ectoplasmic next big things, against the lack of sincerity and desire that chills our hearts and makes us fall out of love with our music.