Real Estate Let in Some Light on Daniel
The Brooklyn-via-New Jersey band’s sixth album shows traces of kaleidoscopic optimism.
There was a while when Real Estate was pretty much the musical embodiment of youthful ennui. The Brooklyn-via-New Jersey band made languorous songs—on albums like In Mind and Atlas—about self-doubt in its various forms, most often in the context of relationships. Eventually, though, adulthood comes creeping in, and the ennui changes shape, even if the existential uncertainty doesn’t fully go away.
The songs are still languorous on Daniel, Real Estate’s sixth album, but the self-indulgence of young people obsessed with themselves and their youth has dissipated. It’s tempting to say that what has replaced it is nostalgia for the self-indulgence of being young, but that’s not quite right. There is sometimes nostalgia on these 11 tracks, but more often Real Estate are seeking connection in a fractured world where the jagged ends never quite line up. They do it tastefully throughout. The group recorded Daniel in Nashville with producer Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves), though the album rarely sounds like anything other than Real Estate, with the addition of pedal steel guitar here and there. “Victoria,” toward the end of the album, is an exception: The song has a countrified vibe with rolling piano and hazy vocals from bassist Alex Bleekman, instead of Martin Courtney.
If anything, the group has gotten better at keeping the subtlety of their music, and their lyrical sentiments, from straying over the line into dull. The first single, “Water Underground,” spins twice through verse, pre-chorus and chorus—a simple structure that feels infinitely more complex thanks to the intertwining of chiming guitars, a dry resonant bassline and shifting layers of backing vocals. It’s kaleidoscopic. Elsewhere, opener “Somebody New” is taut and bright, with cascades of gleaming guitar spiraling down around Martin Courtney’s plaintive vocals. He sounds as surprised as anyone on the chorus when he delivers the lines that sum up the feeling of the whole LP: “Hey buddy what’s got into you / You’re picking up the slack.”