REAL ESTATE

New Jersey’s Real Estate are a living, breathing, recording embodiment of one of the most pertinent sites of difference between American and British pop culture: the suburb. While we tend to deride the places we grew up in as little more than a high street full of shops you’d never want to shop in and a few pubs you’d never want to drink in, our transatlantic cousins view them as white-fenced-green-lawned sites of potential rehabilitation and places in which youthful vigour and innocence can be refound by even the weariest of late-20s city dwellers.

The band’s perfectly calculated sad-slacker pop chimes and chirrups as charmingly as ever, with Ducktails man – and everyone’s current favourite indie pin-up – Matt Mondanile’s synaesthetically-seafoam-green guitar lines underpinning the structure of the whole record. That Atlas doesn’t chart a huge progression from 2011’s Best-Of- The-Decade-Contender Days is no bad thing; yes there’s another surf-y instrumental, yes bassist Alex Bleeker once again takes the lead on a country-ish downtempo number, no the lyrical content hasn’t really moved on from boys being sad about ex girlfriends, no they’ve not ditched luminescent suburban ables for thrash metal explorations. But none of those ‘faults’ matter: Atlas, somehow, is another near-perfect record, an album you want to carry around with you at all times, an album that makes you want to invite friends round just so you can play it to them, an album that seeps in and stains you with its indelible wonder. An album that’s quietly-casually, or casually-quietly, cemented Real Estate as one of the most vital bands in the world today.

– – – – – – – – –

Words: Josh Baines