Real Estate
(Woodsist)
Martin Courtney's Real Estate is the latest in a string of soft-focus, lo-fi bands that filter the late 00s fascination with fuzz through a bucolic lens. Like Woods and Ganglians, Real Estate aims for eerie beauty, rather than ear-splitting volume, but unlike them, the inspiration is the water. Six of ten songs on this debut album reference various swimming venues - beaches, pools, rivers and lakes. But more remarkably, the sound itself has a watery sheen, as sweet slippery currents of reverbed guitar course over distant water-fogged fragments of melody. There is a sense of floating on cool, gently rocking waves, of summer's idle reveries if not its heat and excitement.
The best cuts have a hazy nostalgia, as Courtney revisits his not-too-distant past. "Pool Swimmers" obscures its half-heard vocals behind shimmering curtains of guitar notes, enveloping memories of "swimming under the power lines" in an aura of dreamy unreality. "Suburban Dogs," one of the disc's strongest cuts, considers the limited joys of Jersey canines, animals (like their owners) "in love with their chains" and constantly compelled to return. There's a slo-mo evocation of long surfside days of partying in "Suburban Beverage" and its zonked chant of "Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel all right?"
Courtney's band includes Matthew Mondanile from Ducktails - and his warm, unstressed and sunny guitar work is one of the disc's main strengths. The two instrumental tracks, laid-back but radiant "Atlantic City" and quieter, subtler "Let's Rock the Beach," particularly showcase his skills, bringing the band's surf-psychedelic atmospheres to drift into the foreground.
The album is a little beach-obsessed, but allow Courtney his fixation. For "Snow Days," right at the end, he returns to his favorite subject from a different angle, writing about the beach during the winter, in an ice storm. It's one of the disc's very best cuts, all shimmering melancholy and softly reverberant guitars, with a noticeable increase in heft and maturity. Monet's wife probably asked him, from time to time, if he was going out to paint "another damned haystack" but considering the same subject from different angles isn't a bad way to get better at it.
Standout tracks: "Snow Days" "Suburban Dogs" "Atlantic City" JENNIFER KELLY
