With the evenings becoming mild enough for showing your ankles, and the sound of the cities sirens fading behind you whilst walking through suburban fields, toward the meat smoke and sound of beer cans being shotgunned. Now is the time for Real Estate!
And no! I’m not talking property investment, although according to Martin Courtney’s business card, he could help you with a semi detached if you’re looking in the New Jersey area.
Real Estate the day job and Real Estate the band. Martin Courtney and his hi-school bros, Etienne, Bleeker, Matt (Ducktails). “ We were always kind of like best buddies. We got each other into all sorts of music and trouble… although the band wasn’t properly started until after we all finished studying and moved back to Jersey”.
A style filtered through Flying Nun Records pop and McCartney’s ‘Frozen Jap’ period, persuasively manifested in to a coherent lazy summer sound, complete with track titles seemingly lifted from a ‘What I did this summer’ titled school class speech… ‘Pool Swimmers’, ‘Suburban Dogs’, ‘Beach Comer’ and ‘Black Lake’ all of which exhaustively dream like. In Martins words “The songs are generally written with a nostalgic, backyard, neighbourhood vibe in mind”
The radar is taking some time out to shift its scope from New York to New Jersey with a spate of bands coming from the historically music rich area, I'm thinking The Boss, Bon and La Tengo.
“We were lucky to have grown up where we did because it seemed like everyone was into music. The next town over from ours was Glen Rock, which is where Titus Andronicus are from” Martin’s song writing teeth were cut writing songs with members of Titus who are currently leading the pack with UK visits and record deals (Merok/XL) “We have heard a surprising amount from people in the UK. We are putting out a UK single on Half Machine records… the UK and US music scenes have always seemed kind of connected, and the Internet has only made that more apparent”
I don’t want to go ahead and call this a ‘scene’ or ‘trend’, I like the idea of a group of friends feeding off each other to much to go ahead and do that, as does Martin, “Im mainly inspired by my friends' music just seeing what they are capable of. It is inspiring to genuinely be in awe of a track and know the person that made it and be able to find out how they did it”.
The people at Underwater Peoples Records have a compilation featuring both Real Estate and band member Matt Mondanile’s instrumental solo project Ducktails, as well as a host of other sun-jammer’s, such as Julian Lynch. These guys are quite rightly littered across the blogosphere at the moment sound-tracking the season with their tape-fuzz-tropical-low-fi-'cadelic intonation.
Keep watching for hopeful news on a UK visit and releases.
http://www.dazeddigital.com/Music/article/3373/1/Now_is_the_Time_for_Real_Estate
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