"Days," the follow-up to Real Estate's 2009 eponymous debut, should have a subtitle "songs for private moments on the New Jersey Turnpike." Though laminated with higher production values and crisper notes, the hypnotic melodies and naive positivity of each of the 10 songs on the album are unmistakably derived from hazy American surf rock.
Throughout the album, airy vocals wax and wane, transporting the listener into a narcotic lull as each note is woven into a dream-like whole. Perhaps to maintain this suspension of reality, abundant effects pedals blend harmonies in tracks so uniform in their composition that no transitions are needed between songs.
The first lyric of the opening song, "Easy," provides both a context and listening instructions for the album: "Back when we had it so easy, I would surrender completely." The album doesn't try to be anything more complicated than it needs to be it capitulates to leisurely reminiscences on the pleasant suburban inertia of the band's New Jersey upbringing. Its lyrics have no agenda and angst is absent from its refrain.
Following "Easy," "Green Aisles" is a more considered ballad that reflects on the quartet's idyllic youth. Though its ethereal vocals are barely audible above the simple and dreamy instrumentation, one line rings louder than the rest: "Our careless lifestyle/ It was not so unwise." The song, rinsed in an auditory sepia, is nudged towards our hearts with wistful goodwill.
Keeping up with a tidal ebb and flow, the band's third track, "It's Real," is a more uptempo remembrance of the hopes of young romance. The extenuated "woah"-laden chorus seems the perfect musical translation of gliding along the contours of a bucolic highway, with a girl on your mind and nobody fully behind the wheel.
Both the instrumental "Kinder Blumen" and the soporific "Three Blocks" gently guide the listener through stretches of aural suburban sprawl. The songs turn nostalgia into tedium and will cause any listener without the aid of a mild sedative to reach for the radio dial out of boredom.
The most standout track on the album is "Municipality," which comes replete with heart-swelling reverbs, aquatic strumming and decadent vocals. But what makes the song unique on the album is its unequivocal depression that resembles Radiohead's "No Surprises" more than anything else.
Drawing the listener from the mire of "Municipality" is "Wonder Years." With a blithe tunefulness, Real Estate compacts the album's denouement into the line, "I'm not okay, but I guess I'm doing fine." Unassuming and optimistic, the band eschews aspirations for the epic in exchange for wholesome contentedness.
Perhaps in response to this absence of ambition, the album's next track, "Younger Than Yesterday," recedes into the sonic background with alt-country styling and overpronounced guitaring reminiscent of Neil Young.
In "All the Same," the album's seven-minute coda, Real Estate signs off with an echoing morass laced with the occasional saccharine verse. Palliative "it's all right"s and "it's okay"s coax the listener to succumb to the band's carefree amicability and "surrender completely." Cycles of sweet-sounding instrumental sections massage you around rhythmic cul-de-sacs that deposit you, with all of the introspective satisfaction gained through the album's wistful recollection, back in the present moment.
"Days" sounds as if the task of producing it was as easy as the adolescence it remembers. It's an ode to youthful elegance and Proustian recollections of sunlight refracted through lawn sprinklers beneath a cloudless sky. The album, though slow in parts, is melodious, unchallenging and quite agreeable. And now, with "Days" as their musical bridge to Brooklyn, Real Estate is ready to cast off their wide-angled memories of Arcadia and simultaneously subsume the edge of their new urban digs.