Real Estate — Breaking the Ritual
Brain Damage
There are different types of albums : relaxing, mind-blowing, boring, groundbreaking and as much as every adjective or superlative you could find while listening to it. Add context or media impact and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with reasons to love/hate the record you just bought (or, you know, internet). Suddenly your brain won’t be able to simply appreciate what you hear anymore, because it already build so many efficient filters. Brains are lazy, hence tend to enjoy when other brains do their work for them, i.e. critics, friends, journalists And there’s not much we humans can do against it because shit man, these disgusting spongy bulbs sometimes grant us with the closest thing we found to happiness : pleasure. And that’s why we poor addicted slaves have to search for tricks to fool our cruel masters. SO SHUT YOUR DAMNED NEURONS UP AND GIMME THAT PLEASURE BITCH.
High Hopes
So how do we break these chains ? Well, we found ways in the likes of sport, drugs, sex, god and… art («but what’s really art ?» you might ask. Just don’t.). We enhance or transcend ourselves to lose some control and truly feel as our body is supposed to feel. Reason set aside, happiness never seems far. And sometimes you reach this perfect moment when all the clocks stop ticking and the waves of this big deep blue come crashing down the shore, muffled as if in a long lost dream that feels so close. Because the time for once is right, just so that it quickly vanishes, leaving you suspended with just the universe somewhere around you — or everywhere. Stop thinking about it, just listen to Real Estate.
«And I might as well be talking backwards
Am I making any sense to you
And the only thing that really matters
Is the one thing I can’t seem to do»
Picture yourself in a boat on the pavement…
Real Estate’s music has been uncanny soft and sweet like clouds of cotton or italian ice cream that never gets you fat. The voice’s frequence and tone perfect the distorted guitar supported by the cake based-like bass guitar. Getting back to my initial point : the band members grew up in a New Jersey suburb. They just wanted to make music and hopefully escape the boredom of everyday’s life there. That kind of «random but well-educated, middle-to-upper class, usual young suburbans»introduction would ruin most of the artist’s sex-appeal. Especially in today’s mass media fueled musical world, where forging one’s own distinct figure -you might say brand- comes before the music itself. Real Estate, however, tend to express their unique vibes throughout their art. The amazing here is the way they handle their instruments. They introduce a rather simple melody with nice guitars, start distorting one of them, line up the bass and make it go, then here comes the drums to hold it together and that’s that. Naturally the vocals follow through and you don’t even notice them, as they are a simple dove falling on the train already flying above the tracks. But suddenly you connect the pieces together and you are hit by the fact that you are in this particular train rolling over the Album’s tracks. And it blows your mind, as all of the previously disappointing and usual music makes sense and breaks free from calculated expectations. Once again time gets silent as the skies smoothly eat the landscape and houses around you. The path you walk everyday repeats itself like any good movie ending. Still, you don’t mind the freedom.
Sweet Emotion
Real Estate is all about acknowledging one’s own nostalgia and failed childhood expectations in order to get along with the life one’s get. And also imagining what if… Because dreams are mostly made to forget we are afraid, are they not ? On Crime, Martin Courtney sings :
«I don’t wanna die lonely and uptight / stay with me, all will be revealed»
Pretty good leap of confidence.
The band’s third album, ATLAS, just came out on Domino Records.
