When Jonathan Richman sang “that summer feeling is gonna haunt you”, he could have been thinking of Real Estate. Listen to the New Jersey boys’ self-titled debut album and prepare for a magic carpet ride to a world of eternal summer feelings. This is indie-pop with a hazy sun warming its bones and coating everything in sight in a sepia blur.
The Real Estate story begins with Martin Courtney’s songs and his desire to put a band together to play them. He arrived back in his native Ridgewood after college in summer 2008, hooked up with some old mates, and everything clicked into place. Courtney had been doing a course in how to sell real estate (apparently, he did manage to sell his granny’s house), so a name didn’t require too much brainstorming.
Real Estate have found their feet in public. In addition to playing shows everywhere that would have them, the band have documented their growing up and falling down on a bunch of seven-inch singles on the Half Machine, Underwater Peoples and Woodsist labels.
These beautifully slow-motion odes to suburban ennui chart the progress of a band discovering the universal in everyday life. As this is something which also informs the work of Garden State stalwarts Bruce Springsteen and Richard Ford, maybe there is something in that Jersey Shore air.
Courtney sees nothing wrong with this. Why go elsewhere when all you need is right around you in your neighbourhood?
“We just want to embrace where we’re from,” he says. “I like where I grew up. It has its faults, like everything else. You can’t really complain about growing up in a suburb. We’re from the suburbs. What else are we gonna write about?”
- www.myspace.com/ realestate
