Prime Property

As Real Estate spent 2014 on the road, piling up the miles in support of their third LP, Atlas, the New Jersey janglers wondered if their unending itinerary was going to bring them back to somewhere they longed to return: Australia. Sharing a “kinship” with local bands like Twerps and Dick Diver, and having loved their last two tours, the band were concerned the timing wouldn’t work out for a third visit. “We were worried for a while, we weren’t sure if it was going to happen,” says frontman Martin Courtney. “It was so disappointing, and such a waste to us, because the shows we’ve played have been so great, and we wanted to come back much sooner.”

Real Estate are, in their own way, a classic rock band. Their roots trace back to the adolescent friendship between their three songwriters: Courtney, guitarist Matt ‘Ducktails’ Mondanile and bassist Alex Bleeker. They were never a high-school band, though, Courtney only learning to write songs when he was at Evergreen State College in the indie mecca of Olympia, Washington (“it was the kind of school where they just let you do whatever you wanted”). “I basically taught myself guitar by learning to play Elliott Smith songs,” Courtney recounts. Fusing the more complex approach of Smith and The Beatles with the classic indie-rock model of Pavement and The Feelies, Courtney fumbled out Real Estate’s formative sound.

Real Estate became a band when Courtney and Mondanile returned to their hometown of suburban Ridgewood, feeling lost and directionless after college. It’s a feeling ever-present in Real Estate’s songs: summer turning into autumn, in a hometown full of memories, the feeling of time-passing tugging at your sleeve. “I’ll have a picture in my head,” Courtney says, “like: ‘I’m walking down the street back in my hometown, and it’s night-time, and it’s a specific time in my life’, and then I’ll write imagery and feelings around that.”

 

“We’re not the most accomplished group of musicians."

On Real Estate’s self-titled 2009 debut, there was a sense of youthful slackerdom in its giddy fuzz, but on 2011’s Days and 2014’s Atlas, things have grown sadder, the duelling jangle of their guitars more elegant. After Days served as their breakout LP, and with his first child on the way, Courtney had to adjust to songwriting as day-job – “I would try to write a song every day, so that we’d have enough to be able to finish this record” – but didn’t concern himself with expectations (although he was prone to “those moments of doubt when you start wondering if by the time you’re finished the record anyone will care about you anymore”).

Atlas was recorded, often live, at Wilco’s Loft studios in Chicago, and attempted to further Real Estate’s reach without straying from their signature sound. “We’ve always loved the way drums sound on Steely Dan records; the way acoustic guitars sound on Feelies records; the way vocals sound on Nick Drake albums, just so warm and beautiful,” offers Courtney. “You get inspired by these different elements from great records of the past, and you want to emulate them, in your own way. But whatever we try to do, we’re always going to end up sounding like ourselves. We’re not the most accomplished group of musicians. I think we do what we do well, but it’s very specific to us.”