Released in the October of 2011, Real Estate’s Days was such an instant classic that we delayed the printing of our 2011 Records of the Year magazine just to include it.
In retrospect, it’s mad that this album was released in October as it is absolutely one of the most sunshine-blasted records ever. It is a jangling treasure of spidery riffs and richly analog rhythms. The band had picked up a cult following after their (also excellent and meandering) self-titled debut LP on the Woodsist label. Days dropped to critical acclaim (Pitchfork leading with a huge 8.7 and declaring it “like a single idea divided into simple statements”) and our Drift Autumn/Winter most played at the shop had a distinctly sunny melancholic energy through our raindropped windows.
Recorded over a five-month run at the Rear House studio in Brooklyn, the production on the record is absolutely fantastic, retaining the lo-fi intimacy of their debut while sharpening their sound and keeping the energy focused throughout. The sound is so breezy, and although it still feels like it is meandering as their debut did, the arrangements are actually meticulous, with so many bell-sharp patterns all in such rich and careful harmony. The clarity of each instrument in the mix also makes it sound timeless too, everything in its right place in natural room ambience, while leaving space for the hazed-out vocals. It really is gorgeous.
Days is an album that sounds like it was captured rather than recorded, an evocative forty-one minutes where you get totally lost in its repetitions.
Real Estate really tapped into some sort of shared nostalgia on Days, with snippets of suburban memory and wistful imagery. None of the songs are hurried, with very few overt gestures either, each song instead quickly forming and rolling and evolving, before slowly fading away again. But all of this, always as a band—playing as the sum of their parts, totally locked into the performance.
Days is an album that we remember most strongly as a feeling rather than a set of songs. Key motives and whispered one-liners always resonate, but it’s all about the mood and how you can just totally float in it.
Happy Days.
