For Real Estate’s sixth album, the New Jersey jangle-pop quintet decamped to Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio A, the epicenter of country music’s post-war shift out of its rougher, twangier roots designed to accommodate large vocal and instrumental ensembles. For a band that’s slowly been broadening its sound, it’s an ideal venue. But as intriguing as the notion of “Martin Courtney goes countrypolitan” is, Real Estate’s relocation was less concerned with the musical possibilities than the symbolic ones. Studio A has made pop crossover dreams come true; so has producer Daniel Tashian, a Grammy winner for his work on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. Unlike Golden Hour, there’s no disco excursion on Daniel—they already pulled off that trick on 2020’s The Main Thing—but it’s the cleanest and leanest album they’ve ever made.
As such, Daniel may seem like a sort of retreat. The Main Thing was intended to be Real Estate’s statement album, but as with so many pandemic-era projects, the lack of an accompanying tour made it an unfinished argument. Left to his own devices, Courtney recorded a solo project that tacked away from extended arrangements and jazzy sophistipop. Some of that was out of necessity (he tracked the bulk of the instrumentation on his own); some of it was the lower expectations for an album that wouldn’t be played live any time soon. And some of it was the pleasure of writing an indie-pop song like “Corncob,” which put pedal steel to a gorgeous melody that recalled the Shins at their most magisterial. Daniel carries that pleasure forward, pedal steel rig in tow.
There’s an urgency to these songs, even at their lightest. On “Haunted World,” Real Estate snap from AM country gold into chiming choruses with the efficiency and feel of a crack studio group; guest musician Justin Schipper’s pedal steel curls around Matt Kallman’s soft-rock keyboard fills like cigar smoke. The ill-at-ease “Market Street” shuffles R.E.M. albums like playing cards—from a high-stepping, almost four-on-the-floor clip that would be at home on Green or Document, Julian Lynch draws a snarling guitar line out of “Ignoreland.” According to press materials, the band wrote Daniel with “’90s soft-rock radio” in mind, which presumably means adult alternative instead of, I don’t know, Richard Marx. “I hear a song there inside my head,” Courtney sings on the bright-eyed lead single “Water Underground.” “Can’t lose it yet, try to make it stay.” The chorus suggests that the song may be “There She Goes.”
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.
