he concept of "jazz" is often employed by indie rockers as a hip thematic concern, like flying saucers for the Pixies or jet planes for Guided By Voices, as if its very mention screams "check us out, we're complex like American classical." Bands such as Cap'n Jazz and the Jazz June sport the term front and center like a fashionable suit, displaying little if any appreciation or knowledge of the genre whose name they misappropriate. Even math-rockers Don Caballero, whose improvisational and experimental leanings give them a stronger claim to the word, inexplicably use it in the title of one of their most ponderous and least live-sounding tracks, "The Peter Criss Jazz". I'm sure all these bands are smart enough to understand that what they're doing is mostly if not entirely jazz-irrelevant; which makes their use of the term smack more of winking hipster calculation than genuine reverence.


Bostonian indie-jazz quartet Karate seems to have a more credible appreciation for jazz and its derivatives than some of their philistine peers. But regardless of what anyone else tells you, and I'll probably repeat this for emphasis before the end of the review, Karate ARE NOT jazz. They're jazz-influenced. See, there's a difference: they've got the laid-back rhythms of bop's cooler end, and it's clear that lead guitarist/singer Geoff Farina's learned his Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny remarkably well, but the surges of distortion and too-clever lyrics never let you forget who inspired these guys first. Of course, that's probably obvious from the more Slinty selections in their backcatalogue, but records in the "Jazz" section as a rule tend to be longer on minor 7th solos than on ironic self-referentiality.


Before I continue, I feel compelled to relate that I'm not a huge jazz fan. However I do have more than a passing knowledge of the form, owing to the fact that my mother's an internationally acclaimed jazz singer (look her up on AMG sometime. . . hi mom. :-P). This is all to establish that you can trust my consternation when I hear indie-types set Karate on the same level as Weather Report or, I dunno, Return to Forever. But my job as a reviewer is to make comparisons, so i'll just say it: Karate is the Steely Dan of indie rock. Sure, Becker and Fagan never had any reservations about their pop aspirations, just as Karate make no bones about their lack thereof, but it's all there: the lyrical arcana and irony, the instrumental and compositional complexity, the general sense that the band is way smarter than you. . . yeah, I'm sticking with that connection.


Cancel/Sing gives you two tracks, "Cancel" and "Sing", in 26 minutes, thus qualifying for the price-reductive designation of EP. "Cancel" kicks off with a bassline that rises and falls gently as a rubber ball in slow-motion, as a bass drum and rimshot unobtrusively keep time. When the clean guitar enters before the minute mark, it engages the bass in the type of relaxed melodic play emblematic of much modern instrumental jazz. And then the seventh chord hits. . . I don't know, whenever I hear a clean guitar play a seventh, I always think jazz. Farina's singing is still indie, cryptic and stream-of-consciousness as always, on-key but detached. Actually, the only lyric I can recall right now is "post-punk," which helps to vindicate my analytical standpoint. Karate know exactly what they're doing, and they fill out the rest of "Cancel" with some striking guitar work, both clean and overdriven, before ending in a dreamy yet brief cascade of delay and what sounds like theremin.


"Sing" opens in a jazzy primordial soup, as short guitar fret-runs whip past distantly related bass passages, and the kit rattles on unaware of the whole exchange. This chaos soon gives way to a more rockist approach, with a legato guitar riff and occasional rhythmic additions supporting Farina's lyrical meta-obsessions. The instrumental interludes between the vocal sections are long on melody but aren't terribly memorable. At just before seven minutes in, the band settles into a chill mid-tempo groove conducive to minor head-nodding. From there, we get some more vocals, a little pitch-adjusted feedback, and then they rock out the coda Juno-style, with delay pedals set on "coalesce".


Okay. Probably the biggest difference between Karate and Steely Dan is that Karate are more pretentious, less poppy, and in the end, less talented. A strong jazz influence shows up in the impeccable musicianship and admirable arrangements, but the songs simply don't leave much of an impression. Without hooks, Karate's admittedly unique sound never surpasses above-average, but a full-length is forthcoming, so I'd say there's hope yet. And in case you forgot: Karate are not jazz.