Karate POCKETS (Southern)

Karate frontman Geoff Farina wasn’t playing indie-ironic when he titled the A-side on a 1999 solo seven-inch "Steely Dan." Over the decade since they debuted as a local act playing a hushed variant on the brainy math rock that was then sweeping the country’s dormitory common rooms, Karate have sharpened their sound into a distinctive brand of chops-heavy emo jazz that, like the music Walter Becker and Donald Fagen made during the sour ’70s, conceals sophisticated lyrics behind anodyne guitar solos your dentist might use as an affordable anæsthetic.

The Dan sang about hookers and pimps and crooked businessmen; Farina sings about media consolidation and existential crises and crooked businessmen. But his guitar solos keep getting better: throughout Pockets, Karate’s sixth full-length, he leans on his tremolo bar the way more guys his age should, and he strings notes together as if he were making an ex-girlfriend a necklace out of tiny glass beads. His band mates — bassist Jeff Goddard and drummer Gavin McCarthy and, on two songs, second-guitarist (and Boston-scene fixture) Chris Brokaw — lay down grooves modeled after those by Steely Dan’s sidemen: restrained enough to dodge the spotlight but with the right amount of swing to keep things moving. Their salty-pretzel logic is worth savoring.

(Karate play this Saturday and Sunday, November 6 and 7, upstairs at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; call 617-864-EAST.)