Depending on your choice of evocations, Real Estate’s musical continuum is synonymous in an almost literal sense with the comfort and familiarity of home, or on the flipside, its highly bankable obsession with melody makes for a listening ride of which the parameters are totally understood, even before it’s begun.
Lead singer Martin Courtney is well versed with either argument; he’s pointed in fact to the band’s label mates Animal Collective as a dizzying antithesis to their unbroken and hence unfixed approach, the maverick three/foursome by contrast changing stylistic tack with every new release.
In Mind is Real Estate‘s fourth album, the first since founder Matt Mondanile’s departure to concentrate on former side project Ducktails and also follows Courtney’s 2015 debut as a solo artist, Many Moons. If either of these were prompts for change (and it’s probably a fair observation to say that Many Moons wasn’t much more than a zipcode away from the archetypal RE sound) then many will be unsurprised to learn that they’ve certainly been suppressed, or gently ignored.
For better or otherwise therefore, those already keyed in to all the band’s existing virtues will not be leaving this record using phrases like ‘radical overhaul’.
Mondanile was replaced with Julian Lynch (already a long term friend) and Matt Kallman completed the revamped line-up on keyboards, but such is their consistency in the face of upheaval that first timers can join the story here, or via 2014’s Atlas, or 2011’s Days, much to the same effect. Each of these releases are little benchmarks, platters on which you can avail yourself of the wristy, evergreen indie-pop abstraction which they’ve made their own by degree, a brand crafted in the idyllic suburban glow of Courtney and long term collaborator Alex Bleeker’s home of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Their direct and indirect influences – soulmates The Feelies, The Byrds, R.E.M., The Smiths – are worn like medals, harking back to simpler times of greater substance.
The opening notes of Darling are like putting on your favourite coat. Guitars pick carefully through scales like birdsong, Courtney’s words are draped in a sigh, the structure, the balance of the thing is impeccable, its own little perfection. This is territory that Real Estate more or less own, sure, but their knack of finding a new little kink within our sensibilities each time we go round remains undimmed; here White Light is that incremental, an amalgam of every hook you ever practised in the mirror, a little precious maybe, but wonderful and naïve all the same.
Those with an intuitive ear will, however, notice a little less polish here than on Atlas, Courtney pointing to becoming a father twice recently and a sense of familial duty to cocoon, to protect its innocence being a major contributor to the headspace in which In Mind was created.
Closer Saturday ups the melancholy, ruminating on youth and the wrong of not coming to terms with progress: “When a stranger is living in your old house/What does where you were born still say about you?/It’d be best to jettison what you can’t redo”. Meanwhile, on Two Arrows Lynch employs some neat effects and Kallman wrings out some old time charm from his kit, neither of which count as splitting from the whole goddamn programme, more explorations in roughing things a little.
This diversion remains in place for Same Sun, on which the quintet sound almost wonkily awkward, whilst After The Moon is a lullaby, Teddy Ruxpin and Minnie Mouse waltzing perilously around the edge of dreams. Or at least it seems so. True to form, much of any meaning is lost to allegory, although the finest moment here arguably is Holding Pattern, its downbeat, economic chords matched by a slightly eerie musing on being unable to find closure or definition.
Eventually though, no matter how many switchbacks you make along the journey, you end up with the biggest strength/greatest weakness gig; it’s what Real Estate have to wear like a millstone every time they emboss their catalogue with something new. In Mind is what it is, a cherished ripple across a pond in a somewhere that everything happens everywhere else.
It’s a spell they don’t want to break, and neither should we.