Boston trio
Karate began incorporating new ideas into their intricately constructed post-hardcore style 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.
Time Expired collects
Karate's output from the time of their 2000 album
Unsolved to their initial breakup in 2005 after releasing their final album,
Pockets, the year before. It's a definitive look at the phase when the group 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" in 2002, 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 always at the core of even the band's most stylistically unmoored songs.
Time Expired collects
Unsolved,
Cancel/Sing,
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 reined 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) illuminates just how far outside the indie rock trends of their day the band was. ~ Fred Thomas