Cutting edge

The following night the local foursome Karate marked the release of their Karate debut CD on Southern by playing in the much smaller upstairs room at the Middle East (capacity 150). And a month earlier another local band, the trio Pie, celebrated the release of their first CD, Strictly Seance, on the new local indie Big Top, in the very same room.

Now without taking anything away from Bonham -- a talented artist whose new disc was praised by Rolling Stone for the good reviews it had been getting a month before it was even in stores -- we'll assume that Karate and Pie didn't have any help selling tickets to their CD-release parties. But both have something that Bonham's label couldn't buy, or even simulate by having her first EP (The Liverpool Sessions) come out on the indie CherryDisc label: an organic kind of integrity that can separate rock, be it in the form of a CD or a gig at the Middle East, from countless other cynically marketed consumer goods and services. And whether Pie or Karate make it onto the Billboard charts, their CDs are likely to rank as two of the best local releases of the year.

"Sometimes style just blurs the line/Between what's real and what's divine," sings Karate frontman Geoff Farina on one of the nine angular tracks on Karate. A rubbery funk bass line and a busy drum pattern tug at Farina's clean, unprocessed guitar, which he stoically holds back from the kind of serrated punk assault that the intense tone of his voice would seem to call for. Finally he raises his voice and screams "Money" again and again, until it sounds as if he were saying "My name," an unsettling transformation that calls to mind one of the bands Karate have opened for, the revered Fugazi.

Karate, who recorded their debut as a trio (Eammon Vitt on bass and Gavin McCarthy on drums) and recently added Jeff Goddard (formerly of Moving Targets) on bass while moving Vitt over to second guitar, offer emotionally jarring music that's more personal than political. There are hints of Fugazi elsewhere on the disc, in the troubled tenor of "What is Sleep?", where Farina latches onto a forceful melody and wonders, "What is heavy when you're weak?/When you're awake for days, what is sleep?" You can hear Karate internalizing the skeletal/abrasive, soft/loud dynamics of the obscure yet influential and now defunct Louisville group Slint in the sudden stops that disturb the tenuous tranquillity of the disc's opening track ("Gasoline"). The dynamics are likewise there in the haunting atmosphere of "If You Can Hold Your Breath," an ominous track that offers only a few vivid, impressionistic details of a drunken, late-night road trip to Walden Pond.

Pie aren't terribly shy about their influences either. Strictly Seance opens with a big, melodic, wall-of-guitar salvo buoyed by a booming bass and muscular drums that might sound a bit generic if it weren't for the Superchunk-style dissonant overtones that hover around the bass and guitar, and the rather idiosyncratic lyrics about a male porn star. "Tony, porn star from America/You've flown so high to fall so far," begins singer/guitarist J. Hugh Dickey in a voice that's too earnest to be entirely serious. Bassist Paul Rechsteiner and drummer Vinnie Scorziello keep the momentum building so steadily that it's easy to miss the way Dickey sarcastically stresses the last syllable in the word "international" later in the song -- a subtle affectation that either mocks or mimics the tongue-in-cheek approach Pavement's Stephen Malkmus is famous for.

It's hard to know whether Pie are embracing or poking fun at Pavement by the end of the disc, when Dickey undercuts the plaintive quality of the almost folky "The Lost Expedition" with a delivery that's too deadpan to be taken at face value. It's a great song either way, and that's half the fun of Strictly Seance, a disc that segues from churning guitar-fueled rock to the occasional improvised noise jam, from a focused riff that might remind you of Seaweed to something more in line with the Sonic Youth-school of noise . . . all without seeming the least bit calculated.

Like Karate, Pie can't count on a major-label hype machine to push their CD. But Karate are on a label with strong international distribution, and Pie have already gotten favorable national exposure in the College Music Journal. It's worth remembering that some of the most significant bands to have come out of Boston recently -- groups like Morphine, Sebadoh, and the