Karate
Some Boots

Soft lights and velvet. Cigarette smoke that, after distracted puffs, rests in midair. Faces that don't feel like talking, fingers dancing on the edge of the glass. It's raining hard outside and maybe, just maybe, you've kept a bit of that rain inside you.

The band on stage knows what they're doing. Bass (Jeff Goddard) and drums (Gavin McCarthy) seem like the oddest couple you've ever seen: the first small and hairy, the second tall and bald. You listen to them play together and start to think they've done nothing else in their lives. They chat tightly like two desk mates while someone else is at the blackboard being asked: a fluid chase of note pulses and snare drum. Dry and tight, yet warm and "soft".

The singer/guitarist (Geoff Farina) has the face of a banker who doesn't love his job. He treats notes as if they were watercolors: skillfully diluting them with silence whenever needed, letting them harden with adept pedal touches, to find the shade that separates sound and noise ("In Hundreds"), as he did a few records ago when everything was rougher and "harder" (like in the "mosquito-y" breaks of "Original Spies"). Thus emerges a sky that is not jazz, not blues, not indie anymore, but is all this and more. It's the edges that are blurred, the architectures that are soft, malleable, ready to be seduced by the desire to improvise, to play with harmonic loops, not to be limited to the usual dance of verses and choruses…

Then it happens that you feel like dancing to an offbeat that manages not to be trivial ("First Release"), or cradle yourself in the languor of a boisterous wah-wah ("Airport"). You find yourself encountering measured virtuosity ("Ice Or Ground") and little rocking explosions ("Not To Call The Police"). And it happens that, when "Corduroy" starts, your eyes get misty. You blame the smoke, the tiredness, these damn lights not doing their job. But you know that's not it. It's a blues of ruthless sweetness, with a lazy pace, growing slowly but inevitably, until it becomes painful and distorted... and suddenly, you no longer care if others see you cry.

Until it's time for a long and disorienting breath ("South"): everything you had heard until then fades, of the groove and sounds you had grown accustomed to, little or nothing remains. Suddenly there are only very close echoes of notes that remain intangible and a voice of those that give you a bit of nostalgia, hoarse and sad just right, but with that mix of irony and resignation that keeps it beautiful and not cloying. What I love about Karate is their absolute lack of excess. I love their ability to be original without inventing anything. I love the contrasts, those contradictions in terms that you can't avoid when trying to fit them into some definition, some genre.

"Some Boots" ('02) is no exception: it is a blending of sounds into one another, a discreet mixing, a perfect interlocking of so many influences, of so many inspirations. It is music that crosses genres, but on tiptoe, so as not to disturb.