Music Monday with PLC is a weekly feature written by my husband, Pat.
Find out the back story + check out the full archives HERE .
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Real Estate
[photo by jennifer; review by pat]
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A couple of weeks back I was flipping through the channels and came upon “Storage Wars”, A&E’s “reality” series of auctioneers and profiteers. It was a marathon that kept coming at me one after the other, and I could not stop. It was like a cross between Geraldo Rivera’s special on “Al Capone’s Vault” and “Let’s Make a Deal”. Who would get it? What would they find? How much was it worth? So many questions. Then somewhere into the third hour, I started to feel a little sad. Sure, a little for myself, but also for the realization that each one of these units was filled with someone’s stuff that had been abandoned. What led these people to have to leave behind all of their stuff?
“Days” is the sophomore release from the band Real Estate (2011 Domino Recording Co.) that left me feeling a little the same way. This is a very easy on the ears laid back record, but the deeper you listen the more the melody and the melancholy come to the surface. All of this hidden beneath the float-on-the-waves vibe of it all. You can listen to this album all day long - it's the baby bear of indie rock records, not too hard, not too soft. And then they reward you with this gem of a truly hilarious video for their song “Easy”. Great stuff.
Real Estate seems like a really nice bunch of well-mannered guys. Led by Martin Courtney, who is Soc enough to make Stephen Malkmus look like a Greaser. They hail from Ridgewood, NJ and now make their home in ... wait for it... Brooklyn, NY. Hey, maybe one day in the future there might even be a “Storage Wars - Brooklyn”. The auctioneer will cut the lock and find nothing but slouchy knitted caps, KEXP t-shirts, and Pitchfork-approved vinyl records, but not so much of the “wow factor”. But you can’t help wishing the best for Real Estate. They write good songs that have just enough vocal and guitar hooks to get them to the front of the indie rock line. Hell, they can make a nice career out of just selling their cds to Shins fans alone. Check out the song “It’s Real” live from their Insound studio sessions for proof of their solid pop chops.
Real Estate are a good band that are going to make a lot of people really happy to turn on their music and daydream a little bit of their lives away for awhile. And for this reason alone, everybody should have an album like this in their collection.
- PLC
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MORE:
- last week - Company of Thieves
- last month - The New Pornographers
- full archive of Music Monday with PLC - HERE
