Karate - In Place Of Real Insight (2021) Hi-Res

On 1997's In Place of Real Insight, Karate made an intelligent, straight-ahead rock album that borrowed the stop-start cadences and tired loud-soft dynamics of D.C. rock, and filtered them through a grad student geek-chic sensibility. And it worked. The resulting music was rough-edged but musicianly, sounding kind of like the Warmers after a half-year of music lessons. Geoff Farina's effete, lilting vocals might have come across as just plain annoying in any other context, but the earnestness of his delivery along with the album's unhurried, lounge-core feel, and the punchy guitar tone Farina coaxes out of his Fender gear worked. Like, synergy, man.

1998's The Bed is in the Ocean took Karate down a new path. The album was like your friend's hairbrained scheme that you agree to go along with, if only because the last one worked out well. And again, it worked. Bed smoothed over the abrasive elements of their previous album, employed more complex chord changes, and garnished it with meandering, jazzy guitar lines. Many of the songs incorporated "jammy" interludes that narrowly evaded corniness on the merits of their execution, a feat in and of itself. But it was a balancing act that worked precisely because of the precariousness of the proposition, and not despite it.

Which brings us back to the album at hand. Unsolved is a jazz album. Whether or not it's an "authentic" jazz album, or just three rock guys playing jazz make-pretend, I couldn't tell you. My knowledge of jazz guitar begins and ends with having read the name Django Reinhardt somewhere, once. But, does it matter? The drummer uses brushes on some songs, distortion is scarce, and the progressions sound damn jazzy. Gone is the sugar that once made the medicine go down. It couldn't even be called jazz in rock clothing.