Karate (us) + Kinsella & Pulse, LLC (us) I Arena Wien
Schedule
Mon, 21 Apr, 2025 at 08:00 pm
UTC+02:00Location
Baumgasse 80, A-1030 Vienna, Austria | Wien, WI
Doors open: 20:00Formed in Boston in 1993 by Geoff Farina, Eamonn Vitt and Gavin McCarthy, Karate added Jeff Goddard on bass in 1995. The band released six studio albums, two EPs, numerous singles, and split 7”s between 1994 and 2005. From punk roots, the band ventured widely—veering into jazz-rock, post-rock and a unique version of slowcore in its progressive indie experimentation.
The band re-emerges in Fall 2024 with Make It Fit, its first new studio record since 2004’s Pockets. Make It Fit, the band’s first album in 20 years, doesn’t try to recapture a youthful, DIY-era magic. Instead, it picks up where Karate’s three musicians are today: with a deeper skillset, adult angst cut through with moments of joy, punctuated with searing instrumental performances.
Make It Fit is the opposite of a cynical cash-in. It’s daring, requiring a full commitment from band and audience. And Karate’s reunion is soaking in gratitude. This time around, Farina says he appreciates it all more. “I appreciate that I’m playing a show. I used to get up on stage and be annoyed at this and be annoyed at that. Now I get up on stage and feel incredibly lucky. Just being able to do it again is so much fun. Just hearing us together on stage feels so right.
Support:
The music of the newly re-branded Kinsella & Pulse, LLC - previous albums by the duo were released as Good Fuck and simply Tim Kinsella & Jenny Pulse - contains some of the most forward-thinking postmodern pop of the past decade. Their latest, Open ing Night, follows 2023’s acclaimed Giddy Skelter and delivers a tantalizing left turn that finds the maverick experimentalists’ restless imaginations and formidable skills undiminished.
While the meticulously crafted audio mosaic Giddy Skelter showcased the duo’s innovative production and skillful sound design, Open ing Night offers listeners a more natural perspective. The fruits of this strategy can be heard, in particular, throughout the entire first half of Open ing Night, a five-part suite recorded in one uninterrupted take that plays more like a well-curated DJ set than a traditional album side.
Kinsella & Pulse, LLC arrived at this approach following four months of touring across the US and the UK abetted by multi-instrumentalist Theo Katsaounis, who had performed alongside Kinsella in Joan of Arc. Fresh from the road, the band de-camped to Sudestudio studios in southern Italy, taking full advantage of the studio’s collection of vintage gear and instruments.
Upon returning to their hometown of Chicago, the band reconnected with longtime collaborator Cooper Crain at the famed Electrical Audio to record additional tunes for the album and add overdubs to the Sudestudio tracks, inventively using the studio to pay homage to Steve Albini’s iconic drum sound by re-amping their Roland drum machines through speakers.
The band’s self-effacing description of their approach on Open ing Night is “anti-production,” but this is somewhat misleading. While their decision to foreground performance over production is clearly audible, the duo’s irreverent approach remains more KLF than Carole Kaye.
The album opens with “Sally,” which places Pulse’s captivating vocals front and center. Pulse has referred to the band’s current sound as “Chicago post-rave desert art-pop,” and this opening cut leaves one to assume that the “desert” to which she refers is some 8000 miles east of California, evoking as it does the tantric, tube-rattling trance blues of Tinariwen.
This sets the tone for the remainder of the record and serves as an ideal introduction to the singular m.o. of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC. Though faithful to the legacy of left-field pop, Kinsella and Pulse consistently add just the right amount of knotty tension and dubwise dissonance to what are essentially alternate reality chart-toppers.
Even the central conceit of “Love” - surely one of pop music’s fundamental subjects - is given a sassy, cosmopolitan sheen that manages the feat of making a paean to desire sound novel.
”It would be an oversight to neglect mentioning Kinsella and Pulse’s evocative lyrics. Kinsella, in particular - the author of several novels - is rightfully celebrated as one of the most talented and original wordsmiths to emerge from the 90s DIY punk scene, and on songs like “Cracked Factory Wall” - the finest song to ever namecheck doomed actor John Cazale - he expertly wields descriptive language to paint vivid, dreamlike scenarios:“You appeared like the word ‘yes,’ sculpted in glass and pumped full of smoke… You appeared like a life-saving joke: timed just right, and not too funny.
”Of course, this being a band of irreverent punk rock lifers, it’s not all Pushcart prize-bait: refreshingly, Kinsella and Pulse also instinctually know when to cut to the chase, as when Kinsella nonchalantly sings, in one of the record’s many delightful “did-I-hear-that-right?” moments, “I fuckin’ hate my dad.”Open ing Night is the sound of three decades of post punk, underground dance music, and theavant-garde culminating in a singular vision of smart, mutant pop, adding to a continuum that runs from Davids Bowie and Sylvian all the way to Shudder To Think and Gang Gang Dance.
Imagine if SST-era Sonic Youth had been influenced less by Glenn Branca and the Ramones than by Juan Atkins and The Residents. Such is the intoxicating and irresistible duality of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC, who, with Open ing Night, deliver their finest work to date.
Vorverkauf/Presale € 25,- (+ € 2,50,- Fee)
Abendkasse/Doors tba.
Veranstaltungsort:
Arena Wien - Kleine Halle
Baumgasse 80
1030 Wien
Where is it happening?
Baumgasse 80, A-1030 Vienna, Austria, Baumgasse 80, 1030 Wien, Österreich,Wien, Österreich, Austria
