Real Estate - Daniel

This sixth full-length from Real Estate, which arrives as they mark fifteen years together, was recorded in Nashville in just nine days under the tutelage of a producer who’s won Grammys for his work with Kacey Musgraves, but anybody expecting either these myriad country connections or the fast pace of the recording process to have rubbed off on the sound of ‘Daniel’ will be disappointed. Their line-up has changed again too, but this is, in the main, the same Real Estate we’re well acquainted with by now - the one that frontman Martin Courtney uses as a vehicle for the handsome, gentle brand of indie rock that he carved out on ‘Real Estate’ and ‘Days’, and had pretty much mastered by ‘Atlas’ a decade ago. Since, the group have largely focused on tinkering with, rather than reinventing, a winning formula, with some pleasingly subtle expansion on 2020’s ‘The Main Thing’. Here, perhaps counterintuitively, they go against that, bringing in acoustic and slide guitars for a disarmingly simple set of songs that nevertheless still lack the rustic feel that you might have expected Nashville’s country tradition to have imbued in them. When we finally get a freewheeling guitar solo on penultimate track ‘Market Street’, it is liberating, while the spacey and softly epic closer ‘You Are Here’ might be the standout. For those to whom Courtney’s songwriting is a soothing balm, there is plenty to like here - but there’s a sense of creative inertia that means it’s a difficult record to truly love.