This Be The Verse

Here I go again with another “now-Brooklyn-based” band. Look out, hypocrisy, here I come! So I reverted to the purist, classic-rock approach for a while — and it worked. Now it’s time for me to ease my way back into modern music, carefully. I’m not completely selling out: until Real Estate’s Wikipedia article becomes longer than two lines, I think I’m safe. Moderate internet success denotes musical meritocracy as far as I’m concerned — think Clap Your Hands. So, from the two Wikipedia lines, I gather that Real Estate (other than their cliché migration to Hip-town) are originally from Jersey, that their self-assigned genre is “psychedelic surf pop” (see classification below — it was easy), and that their drummer is also a bongo-ist. Sweet.

Real Estate’s self-titled release is melancholy. Yes. Maybe I find it stimulating because, after two cups of coffee and some well-marketed ginseng-infused drink, everything is stimulating. In all honesty though, despite some drowsiness, the music has direction. It’s the kind of thing you’d want your alarm clock to play for you every morning: pleasant enough that it’ll allow you to finish some dreams and forward-moving enough that you’ll gradually make it out of bed, though it might take a couple of tries. “Fake Blues” is the stand-out track on the album — reminds me of Television’s Marquee Moon in its intelligently coordinated guitar. Maybe that’s it, the song succeeds in its coordination… I haven’t included any lyrics because, frankly, the vocals (which are unintelligible for the most part) are just another contributor to the song’s holistic sound.

And if I hit “publish” after midnight, that’s two days in a row of posting.

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