Real Estate- Atlas

Real Estate's new-ish album, Atlas...:

1. ...is a continuation of, but not a progression from, their previous album, Days
   
2. ...is kind of a let down because it is kind of more of the same we got on Days
   
3. ...begins to seem like less of a let down when you get over the above two facts
   
4. ...is a sign that I am bad at predicting what direction a band will take, because I thought they might pick up on the lengthy outro jam of the closing track of Days, 'All The Same', and their admitted love for Phish and maybe produce their version of Marquee Moon
   
5. ...feels like the kind of album that makes the album that came before it seem even more perfect and fresh by comparison. See also Radiohead's In Limbo making us all realize In Rainbows is one of the best things they've ever done, Battles's Gloss Drop makes us all realize Mirrored is the sort of album that comes only once per generation and once per band, etc.
   
   5a) Atlas also makes the album The Flower Lane by Ducktails (Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanille's solo band/side project) seem more perfect and fresh by comparison, but I'm one of those people who think it's as good as Days or Mac DeMarco's 2. So.
   5b) Speaking of Mac Demarco, you should go watch the documentary about him on Pitchfork called Pepperoni Playboy. It is all sorts of incredible and makes me angry that I haven't had the chance to really groove on his new album yet.
   
6. ...kind of bums me out, because I feel like this band is rushing into maturity, writing songs about serious relationship issues and commitment to a spouse and real heavy stuff like that. Wasn't this the band that just 5 years ago was giving us an anthem with the lyrics “Budweiser/Sprite/til you feel alright”?
   6a) Maybe it is just what happens to everyone who is in their mid to late 20s. You start to realize that life isn't going to last forever. Being well over two decades into your journey, you start to question if everything you're doing I right. And I can tell you, it only gets worse when you enter your 30s.
   
7. ...feels like a parallel to Beach House's Bloom and The Walkmen's Heaven, in that it doesn't best the album that came before it, but you still end up loving it and listening to it a lot once you get over the initial disappointment that it's not going to end up one of your top two favorite albums by them.
   7a) This is, of course, assuming you're a music nerd weirdo like me who thinks so much about music that he assigns top favorite status to specific albums by specific bands as if it matters, really, to anyone. Ever.
   
8. ...has a few of the band's all-time best songs. Now that they're three albums and a handful of singles and EPs into their career, I think we can begin to start making “best of” mixes and imaginary “greatest hits” albums.
   8a) This is, of course, assuming you're a music nerd weirdo like me who makes “best of” mixes and imaginary “greatest hits” albums.
   
9. My Grandpa died today. He was 98. And even though we were very far from close, and he didn't have enough personality or conversation to fill a Dixie cup, he was still my Grandpa, and the world still lost something today. This review, however pathetic of an offering it is, is my attempt to put something back into the world on a day when I otherwise would just have come home, drank some beer, and listened to 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Throbbing Gristle and Alien Soundtracks by Chrome over and over.
   9a) Now, I feel like listening to Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. I doubt my Grandpa liked them or any music, but it's the best I can do.
   

Ducktails- The Flower Lane

If Matt Mondanile were around in the early 90s, there's no doubt he'd have been lumped in with the Stephen Malkmus. He'd get labelled a generational spokesman and slacker prince even though, in actual fact, both men are actually trying in every sense of the word. In interviews they may seem like they barely care and don't take themselves seriously, yet their music is a testament to the idea that what looks effortless and apathetic is often a result of fertile, unobstructed creativity. Malkmus pooled his love of cryptic lyrics, The Fall, sports, California, and noisy pop to eventually become the hipster king we know and love. He's still vital yet he's long since crested the hill. Mondanile, meanwhile, is just about to get to the middle of his journey.

After unintentionally getting swept into the chillwave scene along with bands like Toro Y Moi and Washed Out, Mondanile spent the last Ducktails record, Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics, with one foot in the past and one in the future. Perhaps it took the ascendance of his 'main' band, Real Estate, to spur him to do something more expansive and focused with Ducktails...? In any case, The Flower Lane sees him take command of a full backing band and various guests, wrangling them all onto a record that remakes Ducktails into something more akin to Panda Bear's “separate but equal” solo stuff outside of Animal Collective.

This means The Flower Lane is really god damn good.

If we're going with the premise that Ducktails are essentially a band now and no longer solo, The Flower Lane could be qualified as the true debut of Ducktails, since until now it was Mondanile fiddling around by himself with guitar psychedelics, electronic soundscapes, and scruffy vocals. Mind you, the leap achieved by The Flower Lane is one of overall sound rather than atmosphere. It's still somewhat retro and nostalgic and feels like a Ducktails album feels...but it sounds different. Ducktails to me always straddled the chillwave scene and the scene occupied by modern psychedelic contemporaries like the Black Angels, Mac DeMarco, The Fresh & Onlys, etc. The 'new' Ducktails are still both to an extent while also nodding to modern synth-pop and defunct brothers-in-arms like The Clean and the Flying Nun record label contingent.

Oddly I think The Flower Lane works as well as it does because it barely resembles the Ducktails of old. More than just putting out a polished version of Ducktails III, Matt Mondanile is also trying new things and doing them well. The syrupy guitar solo on 'Planet Phrom' reminds me of a particularly good Felt or Feelies tune, while the '80s digital delay sound on the horns of 'Under Cover' tips a hat to Destroyer's recent Kaputt. Anyway, if The Flower Lane doesn't sound enough like the old Ducktails you know and love, that's only a bad thing if you just want 30 more versions of 'Killin' The Vibe' and 'Welcome Home (I'm Back).' And yes, sometimes I, too, could go for more of those.

Still!

Still, there's no denying how far Ducktails has come. Try comparing songs like the mildly funky 'Assistant Director' to the repetitive, simple, bored-stoned-guy-screwing-around vibe of older stuff like 'Beach Point Pleasant.' No more lo-fi drum beats and guitars ran through a multitude of effects to make up for musical inability/apathy on this record! Now it's more like a sampler platter of saxophones, funky pianos/organs, gleaming neon synth sounds, and female vocals sprayed across a web of jingle-jangle guitars, lucid ruminations, and one of the most reverent and spot-on covers I've ever heard ('Planet Phrom'). With The Flower Lane Matt Mondanile has proven he's a songwriter and artist every bit as capable and imaginative as his better known contemporaries. We may not look back on this one as his masterpiece, but at the very least it's a big step in that direction.

Ducktails- Landscapes

There has never been a better time for nostalgia than the present day. There are so many ways to access the past: classic videogame emulators, YouTube accounts dedicated to obscure shows, commercials, cartoons and so on, to even things like entire websites and blogs dedicated to nostalgic topics, such as the Angry Video Game Nerd On Cinemassacre.com or the Nostalgia Critic videos on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com. About a year ago, I had a deep descent into nostalgia thanks to a motherlode of VHS tapes my parents let me take from our old family collection. Among them were many shows and movies taped off of cable TV, the commercials and station identifying bumps giving me a window into culture from my barely-remembered youth.

I would wager my generation may be the most nostalgic of all, simply because of how soon we became nostalgic, and how soon someone of our music reflected that. By my college years in the early 00s, it was already a thing to hang out, drink, and play old videogames. For whatever reason, the 'chillwave' music made by Ducktails, Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, and others gives the listener a nostalgic feel, and seems like it could only exist here and now, and only appeal to people like me. It brings to mind the glorious aspects of being young in the 80s and 90s without any consideration given to all the bad and serious stuff from those decades which rose tinted glasses help us glaze over. "Glaze" is a pretty good term to describe the music of Ducktails. After all, even the more traditional indie rock instrumentation on Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics seems suffused with a half-baked predilection for effects pedals and cheap production. He could have something better than a used 4-track, but he keeps hocking it for weed money.

Landscapes represents the purest distillation of pre-Real Estate Ducktails, in which vocals infrequently appear, and when they do, they are either earnestly bizarre ('Spring') or sound dribbled from the mouth of someone on strong cold medication ('House Of Mirrors'). This is a lazier, giving-less-of-a-fuck time for Ducktails, bringing to mind the kind of music someone just-serious-enough about music would make while bored, stuck in town during a college Spring Break at their parents' house. On one hand the purposefully shitty/cheap and Casio sounding beats of 'Landrunner' and 'Welcome Home [I'm Back]' are true to the nostalgic, "I made this with a bunch of instruments I took from my parents' attic" spirit of the Ducktails project, but on the other hand, if this guy can afford so many effects pedals, I bet he could afford real drums.

Wait, wasn't that sort of what Ducktails III ended up sounding like? Hmmm, yeah, I suppose so. In which case we arrive at why I love Landscapes in spite of its accidental or willful incompetence. It takes many a productive stoned afternoon and vision to produce tracks like the Boards Of Canada-esque 'Deck Observatory' or the shimmering guitar showpiece 'Wishes', and I admire any man who has one or both of those things. Stoned afternoons and vision, I mean. Ducktails III may be the better overall record, and Ducktails II is an underrated lo-fi classic, but neither has the perfect ability to incite nostalgia in me, or to approximate what it's like to spend your days playing 8-bit Nintendo games while eating Count Chocula and drinking cheap beer at a friends' apartment.

Real Estate- Days

Early October this year was an Indian Summer, as it were, in my part of Ohio. This means that in the morning it was quite brisk and you needed a medium-thickness jacket; when you got off work, the weather was in the 70s and the sunshine, so very good feeling, seemed like Mother Nature was winking at you. It was one of those week or so periods of time where I sat in an old leather chair by my open window, smoking clove cigars, slowly getting drunk on cheap sangria, and beginning to read something I instantly knew I was going to adore (in this case, The Sandman). The cherry on top of this perfect weather and week or so kind-of-a-bender was first hearing an album like Days and falling in love with a band like Real Estate.

Looking back at my review of the band's self-titled debut, I summed up my feelings thusly: “Real Estate is the sort of enjoyable, low stakes indie album with a refreshing lack of pretense or artifice that will never win awards or change the world. Impossible to hate, difficult to fully love, Real Estate is a good little album, endlessly playable but only rarely remarkable.” On first listen, this also summarized my feelings toward the band's new record, Days. I was ready to write my four star review and say the band were even closer to making their masterpiece. “Maybe next time, fellas,” I thought, “now let's go see how the new album by The Field turned out...” However, something funny happened on a recent warm October night: I fell in love with Real Estate.

In the review quoted above, I noted a similarity between Real Estate and The Sea and Cake. This feels more pronounced on Days because the band are drifting further from their psychedelic/surf-rock leaning debut into straight up groove-rock built around the bright, shimmering interplay of Real Estate's guitarists. To put it another way, Real Estate's debut sounds best in Spring and Summer; Days will still sound groovy, mellow, and amazing when Fall finally settles in, and on through Winter. Indeed, Real Estate are more or less turning out to be the heir apparent to The Sea and Cake, minus some of the jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythmic influences of that veteran Chicago band but adding a hypnotic interplay between the guitarists. It's like Television if Television had had two amazing rhythm guitarists instead of two amazing lead guitarists.

As Days is the kind of record which starts pretty good and gets better as it goes, you can bet it also reaches its natural peak with the elongated ending of 'All The Same', hinting at a jammier side of the band than is apparent on their albums or, judging by a live bootleg from 2010 I recently heard, their concerts. One of the album's best songs, 'Wonder Years', is a jangle-pop gem possessing a title which nods to the somehow-80s-evoking scene the band has sometimes been lumped in with. If Real Estate haven't exactly won the attention and sales of better known somehow-80s-evoking acts like Washed Out, Best Coast, or Kurt Vile, Days shows that they have still outstripped them all in terms of nailing down a unique and (seemingly) definitive sound. Call it “coming into their own.” Call it “producing their first great record” or whatever else. No matter the label, it's still the sound of a band realizing their potential.

Days is such a confident and endlessly enjoyable record that one hopes the band don't stray too far from it for awhile. At first, it may come off as lightweight and samey-sounding until, on further spins, something suddenly clicks and you find yourself listening to it over and over for a week straight. These are songs which start off “pretty good” and soon bloom into addictive little tunes you can't get enough of. “Lightweight” it may be...but so are summer shandies and featherweight boxers. But I digress. Days is one of the year's most unassuming and greatest successes. Highly recommended.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Real Estate- s/t

It's strange to me that nostalgia for the 80s has only recently begun to infect indie rock. If the so-called hypnogogic/chillwave sub-genre is all about nostalgia and evoking the 80s while sounding purposefully retro, then the psychedelic pop of Real Estate and similar bands sounds like some alternate history where the 60s psychedelic culture grew out of surf rock and wasn't based primarily on blues and folk idioms. The result is bands that may sound or look hippie-ish, and in the case of Woods, they even stretch out their songs with elongated improvisations like the Grateful Dead, but they aren't really hippies, and their music isn't consciously retro. Hell, you may mistake Woods for 60s holdouts, but their label is one of the few actually putting out albums on cassette. So are they retro/nostalgic for the 60s or the 80s?

There is nothing overtly retro sounding about Real Estate. The syrupy smooth guitars may be signs of 60s worship, but this is just on first listen. The band's self titled debut is every bit as close to less obvious points of comparison, like the dream-pop/slowcore of Galaxie 500 as well as a host of early-to-late-90s indie rock of a hazy, relaxed variety, like Eric's Trip. What's more, the opening of 'Atlantic City' reminds me a bit of the 'surf' version of 'Wave Of Mutilation' by the Pixies. But I digress.

There's an easy going vibe to Real Estate that I find infectious. Whereas The Sea and Cake, long running masters of the indie rock easy-going-vibe category, have an austerity and experimental nature to their music, Real Estate are like the guys who record on a thrift store 4-track, spend their weekends drinking beer and smoking pot, and pen lyrics about the behavior of suburban dogs (the aptly titled 'Suburban Dogs') or conversational snippets like "Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel alright?" ('Suburban Beverage'). The repetitive, hypnotic jam that closes this latter track is among the album's highlights. It keeps threatening to pick up speed and self-destruct, but the band keep riding the groove and adding minor changes here and there without ever truly achieving lift-off.

The instrumental 'Let's Rock The Beach' is at the heart of what this album is about. If you've listened to enough music, this track will be instantly familiar, falling into popular melodic tropes and rhythmic dynamics as the guitarists dance around each other. It's exceptionally well done yet somehow unremarkable. By extension, this covers my feelings for the album, too. Real Estate is the sort of enjoyable, low stakes indie album with a refreshing lack of pretense or artifice that will never win awards or change the world. Impossible to hate, difficult to fully love, Real Estate is a good little album, endlessly playable but only rarely remarkable.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5