Real Estate at Music Hall of Williamsburg 6-5-09

I ended up seeing Real Estate opening for Love is All Friday at Music Hall of Williamsburg. I was there to cover Love is All, but I wanted to see Real Estate rock a huge venue like MH. The kick drum was turned up insanely loud...I've been to this venue before and haven't heard this insane pounding bass before....I had to literally hold on to my beer or it was going to shake off the railing. Even on the balcony it was deafening...but it made sense with their wall of sound.

I loved both of their singles, and was a little confused where they were coming from...I couldn't quite place it into anything else I was into. It's really polished, a little bit country...shoegazey....latching onto huge grooves, but not devolving into a masturbatory jam....ever. They are concise, packed with changing melody.
Real Estate is the perfect moniker...songs about suburbia, that complacency of modern life. The mundane realities...or obligations to get caught up in...the distance... the alienation of a cul de sac.
Great loungey basslines...for a minute I was back in high school at my first show The Ocean Blue at a local college...something about the vocal quality...and when they hit certain chord progressions, but then again their music is just a vision...a dream of the good old days. The uncomplicated high school vacations...the crushing boredom. They are that summer haze...the drunken day at Coney Island, nothing can go wrong, and if it does, oh well, you're just kind of lying there watching everything happen anyway. Wrapped in a wall of reverb, they play with huge peaks and valleys. The rhythm of the waves back and forth...slowing down for a washed out vocal by Matt Mondanile.
Both of these projects are really great, to hear what's going on when that Ducktails sound when expanded into a 4 piece. it's completely it's own with a lyrical element, but keeps it's tropical fog. It's inexplicably catchy, it's hard to think of this outside the context of the indie single...it has palace-like potential in it's own beautiful logic.

You'll hear the major compression I had to try to put on the low end to keep it under control but it was peaking constantly, still it's so worth hearing. Click here to hear it. (18mb-20min)