Karate - Time Expired (2022)

Boston trio Karate began incorporating new ideas into their intricately constructed post-hardcore on their third album, 1998's The Bed Is In the Ocean. Starting there, the band began weaving complex jazz guitar soloing and more advanced compositional ideas into their slow paced, introspective emo rock, landing on a sound not explored by too many of their peers at the time. Time Expired collects Karate's output from between the the time of their 2000 album Unsolved and their initial break up in 2005 after releasing their final album Pockets the year before. It's a definitive look at the phase when Karate all but extracted any hints of punk from their sound, leaning instead into straightforward jazz structures and chord progressions on tunes like Unsolved's "The-Lived-But-Yet-Named," experiments with space and formlessness on Some Boots tracks like "South," and even extended improvisations and experiments with sound processing on the lengthy tracks from their 2001 EP Cancel/Sing. Instead of just assimilating these musical ideas, Karate truly built on them, with singer/guitarist/songwriter Geoff Farina's pensive vocals and sometimes abstract, sometimes emotionally bare songwriting style always at the core of even the band's most stylistically unmoored songs. Time Expired collects Unsolved, Cancel/Sing, 2002's Some Boots and Pockets, and also includes previously unreleased rehearsal tapes from around the time of Unsolved. The extremely lo-fi rehearsal recordings are perhaps the most telling artifact of the entire collection, capturing the band in a moment of uninhibited jamming and giving a sense of how far out their ideas could get before being reigned back in during the recording process. Absorbing the entirety of Karate's second phase presented here (relegating The Bed Is In the Ocean to more of a transitional document) illumintes just how far outside of indie rock trends of their day the band was.

Review by Fred Thomas