Real Estate: "Municipality"

The new Real Estate album Days is, by its own remindful insistence, a uniquely nostalgic and radio-friendly indie rock record—unique because, unlike so many of the genre’s current practitioners, the band point-blank refuses to deploy their nostalgia in anything like a ballistic fashion. That’s to say where other groups pay religious attention to detail or tormented shouting and irrepressible directness (or a quiet, studied moan that is in itself a kind of tormented shouting), which might evoke unstable emotional experiences, Real Estate step back and—if you’ll ‘low the cliché—let this music speak for itself.

They can do that because Mathew Mondanile (of Ducktails) and Martin Courtney can write some top-drawer, harrowing chord progressions. Dense stuff. Watery stuff. Dreamscape shit; this is nostalgic music that actually sounds vaguely nostalgic. There are heart-swelling stores of the stuff here and the genre’s old favourite weapon—emotional devastation rendered pretty and endearingly shambolic; cue chorus, with added CHORUS—is nothing if not well perfused. Mathew Mondanile’s aquaticisms on electric guitar act kinda like they did on the band’s excellent self-titled debut: as the wobbly foundational pillar around which the rest of this sound often vexingly coheres. And on “Municipality,” it comes together beautifully and in a big way, even as it sometimes troublingly sounds like Death Cab for Cutie.

I’ve often thought Alex Bleeker’s calm bass-runs operate on two levels in this sound—as diligent and professional as he can be (and there are stretches all over this song’s darkening hook, where the guy adequately drones), some of his and the band’s headiest material is a result of him deviating slightly from established form. On “It’s Real,” he played a rambunctious, double-speed riff that single-handedly mirrored that song’s dizzy intersections of guitar-lines whilst also adding another spry-cute intersection itself. “Municipality,” as its fallen-civilization title would attest, is a differently hinged beast. Bleeker’s bass is monolithic and repetitive, eschewing those geometric runs for something with the dream-like suck-force of a long and moody tracking shot across supermarket aisles at night. It sounds sad, and not questionably sad, but the sad that reliably stings.

“Municipality” is an undeviatingly depressing song. When one expects (passively hopes!) for Bleeker to add some irrationally bright, trail-blazing run into less bleak modes, the change never arrives; it’s met with more insistence and the kind of subtly inflicted nostalgia that makes this—and the rest of Days—one of the more harrowing listening experiences of the year so far. Mondanile, who, with all his alpha experience at the indie game’s top level, is not above some liberal quoting from Death Cab for Cutie’s The Photo Album (2001). When Martin Courtney comes in to deliver some dapper lines about “driving past hotels,” it’s almost comically beside the very-smudged point. And maybe it’s meant to be? Like nostalgia, there’s a lot in Real Estate’s core-sound that comes off as tangential or even goofy and unintended; Ben Gibbard would’ve extended this to a ten-minute instrumental with unironic flugel-horns, but he wouldn’t have sung or ever been this obvious in his delivery. That’s the final appeal of Real Estate: like the barnstorming first single of this new album indicated, it’s all—in its weird way—fucking real.