Real Estate (2) – Atlas

Despite the album’s impending nature, as if the skies have gently clouded over, leaving you to find yourself standing at an open window wishing that the weather would get on with its plans to storm or either clear up, the single most evident feature of Atlas, is that its beyond clean, beyond flawless, almost to the point of being sanitized.

The chords are clean, the lyrics step lightly and then mesh together like smoke rings rising then dissolving as they hit a cross breeze, creating an intoxicating dichotomy of things beautiful and forlorn within the same blink of an eye. Even the reverb on this album is hazy, as if heard though a neighbor’s open door, leaving the album to sound like something that’s about to vanish into thin air if you listen with too much attention. Initially I wanted to take this as a flaw, but on subsequent listens the record swept back images of The Jefferson Airplane’s “Comin’ Back To Me,” where with clarity and gentleness the songs took on a tentative mysteriousness, essentially held together not so much by the music alone, but by the intermingling of the vocals and the musicianship that are in perfect simplistic sync.

Atlas is not an expansive album, it’s not cosmic, it’s not worldly or broadly defining, it’s more centered and centrally located to be no more than a stones throw in any direction … and sincerely emotionally grounded in suburbia. Real Estate are not an angry band, they’re not a band with anything to prove, they’re not flashy, nor do they revel in depression, sex or drugs. Real Estate are just what you’d expect from any upper white [the descriptor is used modestly] middle class neighborhood, where all anyone wants to do is lounge by the pool, blow the occasional t, and are acutely aware that the hands of time are revolving, yet still hopeful that the clock might spin a bit more slowly if they can only string a couple more wasted days together.

[laughing] In short, Real Estate are the quintessential band for those last three weeks before school begins, though in the time it takes to visualize that concept, it’s down to two weeks. Regardless … we all need a lazy album or two in our lives for those moments in which we wish for nothing more than to linger, and Real Estate do that with perfectly layered unambitious slacker subtleness.

*** The Fun Facts: The artwork for the album comes a mural painted by the Polish artist Stefan Knapp for the former department store chain Alexander's in Paramus, New Jersey. The mural has since been disassembled following the close of Alexander's and the Bergen Museum of Art & Science's purchase of the mural. While various suggestions to the non-profit organization concerning its potential location have amassed, the mural was only recently put on display in Paterson, New Jersey at the Art Factory in June, 2015. The mural has yet to find a replacement for its location of display.

Review by Jenell Kesler