“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, lil”
