They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. With it, Real Estate have made more than just their third excellent record in a row, more than just their best-ever record. But Atlas gazes calmly and wisely into the face of some troubling questions: Mortality, the passing of time, the problem of loneliness. They are places of reverie, of absence, into which the drama of the real-world intrudes. If it has been too easy to underestimate Real Estate in the past, it might be in part because of this: Suburbs are not often stages, in the popular imagination, for great existential drama. Real Estate are a deeply suburban band, and the shade of long tree-lined streets, the lonely symmetry of the houses, rise up continually out of their music. Like that song, Atlas assesses the current moment, and everything leading up to it, with a puzzled head scratch and shit-eating grin. Real Estate have weathered some jam-band comparisons, and Alex Bleeker is an avowed fan of the Grateful Dead, so it feels like a permissible stretch to note that the shadow of a very particular Dead song-the wry, valedictory “Touch of Grey”-seems to hover over Atlas. “I’m staring at the hands on the clock/ I’m still waiting for them to stop” he sings on “Navigator”, the album’s final song and one of many bemused meditations on the passing of time. “I remember when/ This all felt like pretend/ And I still can’t believe,” he marvels on “Crime”. If you’re lucky, like Courtney, you are roughly pleased with what you find, even as you squint bewildered into the recent past to mark the notch where the transition happened. This is a life moment when you engage in a little less dreamy reverie about who you might be, and begin assessing, with some alarm, who you have already become. The bittersweet disorientation of these two competing thoughts-I’ve lost more than I’ll ever know, I have more than I ever imagined-mark out a very particular phase of life, and it’s one Courtney is currently in the throes of: He’s about to have his first child. “Just over the horizon/ That’s where I always think you’ll be/ It’s always so surprising/ To find you right there next to me,” he sings tenderly on “Horizon”. “I don’t need the horizon/ To tell me where the sky ends/ And it’s a subtle landscape/ Where I come from,” he sings on “Had to Hear”. He’s shaping the contours of a world, one that's built on a sense of cosmic gratitude matched by an equal and opposite sense of cosmic loss. Courtney’s words tend to mention the same things over and over-the sky, the horizon, the sidewalk, the houses on his block-but he’s not repeating himself. This simplicity and eloquence is the key to Atlas’ surprisingly profound ache. When the bell-clear leads rise out of on "The Bend" and"Navigator", they feel like spontaneously welling tears. But their two voices, working modestly and in perfect sync, key into a mysterious and powerful emotional calculus. As the tabbed tutorial they posted for “Crime” underlines, nothing anyone is playing would tax a first-year guitar student. The two voices enjoy a near-telepathic relationship, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Courtney’s singing without Mondanile’s guitar twirling around it, and vice versa. Real Estate essentially has two lead vocalists-Courtney’s tenor on the one hand, and Mondanile’s pearly guitar melodies on the other. The clarity of Atlas underlines what an uncommonly graceful unit they are. In this soft light, the band sounds like the platonic ideal of themselves, and it’s difficult not to wish all their albums had been recorded this way. ![]() Courtney’s tenor is soft and even, and the room tone is bruised-ripe like an October sunset. Producer and mixer Tom Schick dissolves the noncommittal haze of reverb that made it sound like you were hearing Days through a fisheye lens, and the crispness that emerges on Atlas is gorgeous. ![]() The result is at once their most forlorn album and their most beautiful. On "Crime", he sings "Toss and turn all night, don't know how to make this right/ Crippling anxiety." The once-ideal pool party band, in other words, has turned to soundtracking the cleanup: Everyone's gone, the sky's threatening rain, there are cigarette butts floating in the pool, and we've all gotta work tomorrow. "I'm just trying to make some sense of this before I lose another year," shrugs Courtney on "The Bend”. On Atlas, their basic sound hasn't changed-frontman Martin Courtney's clean-strummed open chords, Matt Mondanile's bright leads, and a light-stepping rhythm section all squish together comfortably like college housemates sprawled on a sectional sofa-but the mood has.
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