It would probably have been understandable for Real Estate to have changed everything but muscle memory, the repetitions etched into the synapses and the learned routines that bridge our daily lives and help us make sense of them, will always have their say no matter how hard we try.
Now over a decade in, The Main Thing is the New York outfit’s fifth album, an achievement meriting their status as indie rock dons (for those of you unfamiliar, think of an east coast version of Teenage Fanclub with a similar Byrds-ian obsession), and their second since the departure of former guitarist Matt Monandile.
Bystanders would probably say no big deal, people leave bands, especially ones with such longevity, all the time. The co-founder’s exit, however, stemmed not from musical differences, but critical abuses of both trust and friendship, wounds that Estate frontman Martin Courtney has admitted took some time for him and those who remained to process.
Whether intended or not, The Main Thing sounds predominantly more downbeat than its predecessor In Mind, despite the successful replacement of Monandile with Julian Lynch and a change of disposition towards the creative process by welcoming in new blood and thinking. Underlining this new doctrine, Lynch contributes Also A But, a psychedelic swirl with velvet keyboards and a delicate slide guitar, a tune that sounds like it began as a late night jam, or indeed vice versa.
You can argue that a decade of experience gives anyone license to build up from layers like that, but one of Real Estate’s most attractive qualities over time has been their ability to produce material which sounds so rapturous whilst harbouring an undertow. Lead single Paper Cup, for instance, has all their trademark jangle and the novelty of harmonies provided by Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, but on it Courtney frets, ‘You’re trying on new fits/I’m on the same bullshit/But you know I love it/And I can’t seem to quit’, the guilty confession of a modern day minstrel living a Peter Pan life in a viciously Captain Hook world.
There are deeper pools elsewhere too; there’s an almost Cure-like sense of foreboding to Gone: ‘Your mind is gone, it’s not surprising/After the dawn, after the night’, whilst the cinematic instrumental finale Brother is cool and uncertain, a question left hanging after a one-sided conversation.
Is there still the slightly awkward, Ivy League wistfulness many found so admirable? Despite the cautionary nature of most of these tales one way or another, the answer is yes: You unpacks parenting’s universal dilemma of shielding innocence versus imparting wisdom with a gentle grace, while Shallow Sun, November and Procession are all to varying degrees bucolic roads, already well-travelled.
Even if Real Estate had wanted to change everything, the reassurance of familiar ground and the backstop of needing time to heal ensure that The Main Thing rarely performs much out of character.
There is, after all, another decade in which to think about doing that.
