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Album Review

Real Estate
Days Domino

Article written by Ged M - Oct 31, 2011

Real Estate: Days

In the same way that JD Salinger captured the pains of teen-age in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, even though he was 32 when his book was published, the post-teenage Real Estate take a romantic look backwards to dreamy youthful summers past in Ridgewood, New Jersey on their second album Days. There’s even that delicate sense of doubt we all have at that age, as Martin Courtney sings on ‘Wonder Years’: “I’m not trying to be cool/ I’m just trying to be kind”. The melodic, melancholic music similarly harks backwards, in this case to the jangly 80s, where there are echoes of fellow New Jersey-ites the Feelies, maybe a soupçon of The Smiths, and particularly a whole heap of Felt’s elegant, keening guitar style. If Real Estate have a shrine to anyone in their bedrooms, it’s to the great Maurice Deebank.

With Real Estate, everything floats on waves of jangly, twangy guitars that are topped with understated but strangely powerful melodies. ‘Easy’ is laidback indiepop with a strong Felt influence, while the wonderful ‘It’s Real’ races by in a cloud of jangly pop and a hook-sharp “ooh-ooh-ooh” chorus. Guitar- phobes should steer clear of the instrumental ‘Kinder Blumen’, and the 7-minute album closer ‘All the Same’, which slips into a long, rhythmic groove, but it’s chiming, reverby, jangly guitar heaven for the rest of us.

The use of “achingly” (here attached adverbially to “melancholy” in Domino’s paean of a press release) is usually a nasty affectation by unimaginative journalists but it describes perfectly what’s on offer here. Days is a gorgeous album of mood and melody, full of classic songwriting and addictive tunes, that hymns the still-potent power of the guitar in the right hands.

Links:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Real-Estate/104000906303978
http://www.dominorecordco.com/artists/real-estate/
http://www.myspace.com/realestate