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...  more