Ithaca, N.Y. — Indie rockers Real Estate will be performing at The Haunt in Ithaca on September 30, Dan Smalls Presents announced on Tuesday.
“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,” Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote after the band’s latest release, Atlas.
“…Real Estate have made more than just their third excellent record in a row, more than just their best-ever record. They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.”
At least one Real Estate music video also features an outrageously adorable dog:
Atlas, the new album by New Jersey’s Real Estate, arrives through Domino on March 3rd 2014. A triumph of highly evocative, perceptive songwriting and graceful, precise musicianship, Atlas carefully refines, and ultimately perfects, the brilliantly distinct artistic vision that made its predecessors Days and Real Estate so beloved.
The most collaborative Real Estate record to date, Atlas was written by Martin Courtney, Matt Mondanile, Alex Bleekerand Jackson Pollis while cruising through the Arizona desert and during a presser in Madrid, in a practice room in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and in an attic in the band’s hometown of Ridgewood, New Jersey. It was recorded in the summer of 2013 in Chicago with Tom Shick (Sean Lennon, Low, Cibo Matto) at Wilco’s loft studio where new member Matt Kallman (formerly of Girls) joined the fold on keyboards.
Over the course of five years of collaboration and friendship Courtney, Matt Mondanile and Alex Bleeker have honed a masterfully focused aesthetic feel and unique sense of atmosphere in their work, a kind of subtle American impressionism that belies their relatively small discography. Theirs is a subtly inimitable sound that achieves a unique timelessness in its assured identity. Nevertheless, Atlas does not represent a resting on the laurels of Days.
“We wanted to make a cleaner, more well-rehearsed record that reflected the way we’ve come together as a live band over the last few years”, explains Courtney. “Basically we wanted to make a better record than Days without changing the general structure of who we are as a band.”
The songs of Atlas still unfurl in iridescent, warm webs of Courtney and Mondanile’s guitar, they’re still anchored by Bleeker’s nimble bass and they’re still patient and deliberate – ebbing and flowing, frequently building to moments of euphoric release in a way that feels perfectly organic. Likewise the band’s searching, human songwriting still illuminates the quiet, important moments of life in exquisitely minimal language.
