Leave it to Martin Courtney to turn a solo album into a gesture of self-effacement. The singer/guitarist's New Jersey band Real Estate have spent the last six years elevating effortless indie pop into a deeply moving art form, and his fellow group members have routinely worked in side projects—bassist Alex Bleeker with his woolly'n'rootsy Freaks outfit, and guitarist Matt Mondanile with the watery dreamscapes of Ducktails. But Courtney's debut solo outing arrives with his own name pushed to the fore. And yet, Many Moons is hardly the work of a narcissistic singer/songwriter. ("I just couldn't come up with a band name," he recently shrugged.) Instead, the charmingly low-key album is an act of humility and, beyond that, quiet grace.
Courtney's voice, like his name, is front and center here, markedly stripped of Real Estate's signature reverb. And rather than relying on his familiar turn-of-the-millennium indie rock touchstones, the singer inhabits winsome, lightly orchestrated '60s psych pop and '70s power pop (documented in a nicely complementary playlist). The album gains shape thanks to an enviably accomplished band that includes Real Estate keyboardist Matt Kallman, like-minded Jerseyite Julian Lynch, and Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, who produced. Plus, for a set that casually began as a stress-relief outlet ahead of Real Estate's 2014 album Atlas, Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for it. Once heard quasi-chanting about suburban suds, Courtney is now the lawnchair-Zen dad.
The album’s title phrase occurs first amid a hodgepodge of images on the lushly jangling "Vestiges": "Many moons for it to grow/ Phases they will come and they will go." These are the musings of an artist often associated with nostalgia accepting the truism that what we really have left from yesterday is the same ol' never-ending flux. It's a concept he darts around on the equally fine "Foto", which finds Courtney reflecting on an old passport photo: "The past is just a dream." While a line like that could seem nursery-rhyme commonplace on its own, it builds force nestled amid tracks like "Awake", a gentle apology for strumming next door that offers its own ruminations on the past, and "Asleep", a backwards-effects reverie that's somewhere between an "Oh Yoko!" dream and "I'm Only Sleeping". The terrain may be narrow, but Courtney finds subtleties to explore in his quest for a wisdom that will keep growing in meaning as months and trend cycles pass.
Many Moons isn’t all painstaking philosophy on the inevitability of change. A more immediate highlight is "Northern Highway", which cruises along, suitably upbeat, as it balances existential questions ("Do you feel just like a stranger?") with the narrator's avowal that he could never retire to a place without seasons—all via a chiming arrangement befitting the Left Banke. Or "Little Blue", a windows-down listen about windows-down listens that’s named after Courtney’s old car. By contrast, on "Focus", when Courtney implores, as if giving Magic Eye advice, "The trick really is not to try," it's a bit too on the nose; besides, he already put it better on Real Estate's 2011 sophomore LP, Days, singing, "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." The trick is not to reveal it's a trick.
The simple complexities of Many Moons all come together on the 10th and final song, "Airport Bar". It's about, yes, airport bars—places that stay the same while the people who pass through them speed around the globe. The music here is the album's most hypnotic; the lyrics are its most observant. Courtney's raconteur has been asleep, dreaming, before he finally realizes what’s real: "Please don't go forgetting about me," he repeats, understanding full well that Timehop, Facebook's "On This Day" feature, or even ripped-jeans-pocket Polaroids are no substitute for "just being here." It's all unassuming enough that it almost breezes past, and, if Courtney didn't know better, he might even say that's the point.
