Being a self-professed “emo” guy, when I first saw that there was a band called Real Estate, I couldn’t help but think that: a) it was a mistyping of some new Sunny Day Real Estate release, or b) this band was somehow ripping off Sunny Day Real Estate. But while screening the band’s self-titled debut for any traces of SDRE mimickery, I ended up falling in love with it for its complete and utter lack thereof.
Real Estate opens with the track “Beach Comber,” an almost unbearably infectious track that sounds like it came from a band you could’ve seen on the stage of American Bandstand instead of one at South by Southwest. The laidback, beach-y feel, echoing vocals, and scratchy recording quality of this, and pretty much the rest of the tracks, hearkens back to a time when all we really cared about was Coca-Cola, baseball, and rock and roll. And then there’s the instrumental “Atlantic City,” a track that seems almost to be done in homage to the tunes Dick Dale and his contemporaries played—surf-soaked, clean-sounding guitars playing catchy riffs atop the simple rhythm of a muffled 4-piece drum set.
The whole album is refreshing, but in the sense that it feels completely comfortable and familiar. It feels like the summer I first discovered the Beach Boys and the Everly Brothers, when my grandfather and I would drive around town blasting K-Earth 101, reveling in the warmth of the midday sun and a newfound common bond between two very different generations. It’s a long-lost carefree summer timelessly trapped in a single millimeter of plastic.
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