Real Estate | Days

The New Jersey gents deliver their finest album yet.

Guess what? We’re giving away four pairs of tickets to Real Estate’s show at Moe’s BBQ November 3rd w/ Big Troubles and Fingers of the Sun. Email me somethin’ nice at GoDonnybrook@Gmail.com and I just might give ‘em to you!

Most likely to: fill you with nostalgia for years gone by.

If you picked Days, the sophomore album by New Jersey vibe-rockers Real Estate, off the rack at a record store, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were the most boring band on the face of the earth. Superficially assessing their flat, affectless, Google-search-foiling name, even less evocative album title, and drabber-than-drab cover art depicting a row of tasteless, grey prefab houses in a dusty lot underneath a matte grey sky, you might think to yourself “now here’s a band that runs in the opposite direction of any signs of brightness, life, or color.”

On “Snow Days,” the closer from their self-titled debut, main dude Martin Courtney sang of a February day at the beach under a “bright grey sky” that “makes your eyes feel sore.” And therein lies the beauty of Real Estate: there’s brightness to be found even in the seemingly bland. With a merely cursory, inattentive listen, 2009’s Real Estate might have seemed as plain as a grey sky in winter, but Real Estate’s songs reveal little worlds when observed more closely (a decidedly counterintuitive way to hear music that presents itself like something to zone out to on a solitary drive).

Their wispy, lilting sonics, which so easily melt away into a haze of memory and contemplation, happen to be the perfect match for Courtney’s lyrics. He focuses on boredom, angst, and ennui in suburban New Jersey by conjuring a set of experiences that are filled with specific images but should nonetheless feel familiar to anyone who had some time to kill as a child or a teenager. You could spend an entire lifetime listening exclusively to songs about suburban boredom and disaffection, but even in Our Year Of Nostalgia 2011, you’d be hard-pressed to find a band that creates the musical equivalent of those bittersweet lyrical sentiments as well as Real Estate. And the boredom of childhood is bittersweet: it may seem crushing at the time, but in retrospect it reminds you of a time when you could afford to be bored because you were carefree and without responsibility. Thankfully, this wistful quality did not disappear between Real Estate, 2010’s “don’t forget about us!” EP Reality, and Days.

Over these three releases, they’ve moved up the label-ladder from a tiny and aesthetically specific label (Woodsist) to a slightly larger one (Mexican Summer) to venerable indie heavyweight Domino. Accordingly, they’ve got a bit more money to record with now, so the ten tracks on Days have just the right level of studio sheen, making everything sound brighter and crisper, and all of the dynamics more accentuated. It sounds as if the band has been removed from the tank of water in which they recorded their debut—just listen to the version of “Younger Than Yesterday” from Reality and the refurbished version that appears here. Still, much of the album, especially the subdued middle section, will drift into the background obligingly if you let it, and you’ll miss many of the great things that Real Estate are doing on Days.

Another thing that hasn’t changed since their debut: at the center of everything still lies the downright magical interplay between Courtney’s and Matthew Mondanile’s guitars and Alex Bleeker’s bass. Courtney’s and Mondanile’s trebly, reverberating guitar lines, seeming to reside somewhere between acoustic and electric, twist and wind their way around each other like a double helix, while Bleeker’s smooth, contrapuntal basslines ride along beneath. Taken together, the three weave an impressive web of texture and harmonic richness. Out front, Courtney’s vocals are the same thin croon they’ve been all along, but surprisingly upbeat highlights like “It’s Real” and “Easy” find the band making room for more strident melodies and some emphatic, harmony-filled choruses.

They nailed their instantly-recognizable guitar sound on the first album, and they haven’t lost their ear for catchy guitar riffs, so it’s nice to hear Real Estate finding a place for those pop-veering moments and working on other parts of their craft. They use subtle crescendos to great effect on “Out of Tune” (released as a 7” last year), “Green Aisles,” and the instrumental “Kinder Blumen.” And the easiest tracks to overlook might be “Municipality” and “Wonder Years” (featuring a fine vocal from Bleeker), but they’re both gems, nailing the autumnal, melancholic quality that runs throughout Days with great finesse.

Closer “All The Same” might be the most impressive at all, starting off as a propulsive but straightforward number before shifting into an extended jam. It’s pure repetition, but it could extend to infinity and I would sit there, transfixed—it’s a blissful motorik journey, and it shows off their control over tone and harmony. Then they find an appropriate alternative to fading out or just stopping the song in its tracks: incrementally slowing it to a crawl, giving the impression that it’s melting. In the end, it’s the best showcase of, perhaps, the biggest improvement on Days: they’re playing tighter than ever while still retaining their loveable looseness.

I don’t want to overstate the differences between Days and their self-titled, though; most of the elements of their songwriting have remained the same, and that’s just how it should be. Going into this album, they had their work cut out for them in trying to top the ramshackle wonder of “Fake Blues” or “Beach Comber,” but Days is filled with many tunes that rival the best from their previous two records.

Watch the video for “Days” by Real Estate: