Real Estate: Daniel Album Review

But for all Real Estate’s attention to detail—I’m particularly fond of drummer Sammi Niss’ syncopations on “Freeze Brain” and “You Are Here,” which recall the sampled loops that littered Triple A radio in the ’90s—there’s still a sense of incompletion, that in the push to make a particular kind of record, something has been forgotten. As a pop album, Daniel has little room for the jammy excursions of 2021’s Half a Human EP, which at its best suggested a chicken-fried Popol Vuh. But surely they could’ve broken off some of that for, say, the suspended instrumental break of “Haunted World,” which sounds like a roomful of musicians staring at each other, waiting for someone to jump. And the rest could’ve gone to bassist Alex Bleeker’s customary showcase, the cosmic-country trifle “Victoria.” Draped in steel and dotted with crypticisms (“Your consultant has gone out to sea”), it lasts long enough to conjure the idea of a college-rock Flatlanders before evaporating.

The band’s other lodestar during recording was Automatic for the People: a collection of reveries on memory and mortality that—like so much R.E.M. did—is filled with wonder and mystery. Real Estate can do the former, always could, but the latter proves elusive. Some lines here feel like placeholder dialogue that made it to post-production; they land so flat that in aggregate, it feels like a deadpan bit: “Meanwhile on Market Street/Things are happening to some degree,” “We sit in furnished rooms/Listen to Harvest Moon,” “The day becomes the night.” It’s not pop directness so much as straight reportage. (In the classic suburban tradition, Real Estate were always better at listing anxieties than examining them.) The effect is like having beers in your neighbor’s garage. You say goodnight, the door comes down; by the time you’re home you forgot what you talked about. Still, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good hang.

The architects of the Nashville Sound—the people who built and staffed Studio A—reached the suburbs by transplanting the perceived realness of hillbilly music into a pillowy pop container. At their best, the resulting records were glossy and gorgeous: everyday emotions pumped up until they could fill a stadium. Daniel conjures some moments that feel almost as big: the existential skitter of “Airdrop,” the hopeful power-pop pulse of “Flowers.” Real Estate already had the suburbs on lock. In trying to recover their essence on Music Row, 15 years on, it seems they’re not taking that connection for granted.