Real Estate: Days – review

The first thing that strikes you about Days, the second album from Brooklyn-via-New-Jersey trio Real Estate, is its golden warmth. This seems to be a record drenched in sunshine – literally so on bucolic opening track Easy, where singer Martin Courtney recalls running through fields feeling "love for everyone", his soft voice hazy amid beaming guitars. Kinder Blumen is similarly joyful, its buoyant riff suggestive of paddling in the sea and larking in the park. Slowly, though, clouds mass on the album's horizon: you feel their shadows in the discontent of Municipality and the frustration of Younger Than Yesterday, in which Courtney sings, pointedly, "it takes all summer long just to write one simple song". For "simple" read "inevitable": by investing that time, that care, Real Estate make their songs progress as naturally as day passing into night. No wonder these tracks are so instantly memorable, so curiously familiar – and so uninspiring, despite their loveliness.