My father’s musical taste, as I was growing up, heavily influenced the music I listen to today. One of his top listening choices during the early ’10s was the New Jersey band, Real Estate. Jayson Greene of Pitchfork writes, “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.” Their sound is so distinctly etched in my brain, with echoes of the consistently clean, beachy electric guitar that hangs in the background of each of their songs. Their catchy riffs, combined with simple lyrics, remind me of a sunny Sunday morning in my house in the suburbs of Long Island. The band, reunited after touring their most recent album “Daniel” in 2024, is currently doing “The eleven year and seven month anniversary tour” of “Atlas,” a record they released in 2014. When I saw this tour pop up in my email, it was almost comedically evident to me that the band needed money and decided to put together this string of shows to keep their ’10s glory days alive. Nonetheless, the promise of seeing the entirety of “Atlas” live was enticing.
This is an album filled with nostalgia for me, and probably for a lot of the dads and millennials that filled Bearsville Theater on Wednesday night in Woodstock. Every song on the record has the familiar, comforting sound of a classic Real Estate song: the beat of a light snare drum, bright notes being strummed on the guitar. However, some of the songs on the record err on the melancholy side. In “Navigator,” lead singer Martin Courtney sings, “We stare at the shadows on the sidewalk […] I have no idea where that time went.” Courtney often leans into the description of a perfectly suburban setting, which, in this album, evokes the feeling of being lost. On “Primitive,” Courtney sings, “Don’t know where I want to be.” It is almost like a disillusionment with the false simplicity of suburban life. This, I believe, is what hooked my father, and many of Real Estate’s fans who have used this music as the soundtrack to their weekend chores around the house or daily commutes from the city. Despite the apparent yearning hidden in Courtney’s lyrics, there seems to be hope in the instrumental choices made by the band. In “Atlas,” Real Estate dances a fine line between melancholia and hope; it is like you have to decipher the mystery of their music and interpret the meaning behind their secretly loaded lyrics. For this reason, I have always been a fan of Real Estate.
The tickets were cheap—under 30 dollars—and the venue was small and intimate. The Bearsville Theater is situated just past the main strip in Woodstock, on the side of a two-lane road, surrounded by forest. Leaving the parking lot, my friend and I walked to the back of the property, past Tibet Pho and a small boutique that shared the property. We showed our tickets, got stamped and entered the barn-like building, which had a bar and some couches to hang around on while waiting for the doors to open. The New York indie rock band, Trace Mountains, opened, playing tunes similar to the aesthetic of Real Estate—it was as if we were watching Real Estate 15 years younger.
Eventually, Real Estate went on at 9:30 p.m. to a decently full room of people of all ages. There were some older couples, some young ones and some children sitting on shoulders. The stage was ornately decorated with two gold statues holding plastic torches, dark green curtains with golden fringe, and a giant illustration of a bear’s face above the stage. The stage was also backlit with flashing tiles of colorful light. The band first played some newer songs, and after every song, a blue-haired woman in the front kept shouting for them to play “Horizon” from “Atlas.” The guitarist, Alex Bleeker, answered, “Don’t worry everyone, we will play the entirety of ‘Atlas’ in a bit!” “In order,” Courtney added. They played through the album seeming comfortable on stage with the familiarity of their old songs. The crowd swayed. Some members of the crowd mouthed the lyrics to the songs. There were not many phones recording— most seemed to just be watching the stage intently. In the middle of their set, Bleeker shouted out their merch table noting, “It is difficult to be a 40-year-old who’s still in an indie rock band!” He added that a successful merch table was one of their most profitable forms of income at these concerts.
After the concert’s end, we left the venue, walked to the car under the string lights hung across the trees and began our drive home on the thin dark roads between Woodstock and the highway. I would not say I was blown away by Real Estate’s performance, but I do not think that has ever been the aim of the band. They are a band celebrated for their celebration of the humdrum nature of suburbia, of mundane problems. “Atlas” is the perfect culmination of those things, and it felt like a full-circle moment to see it played live after growing up with it playing in the background of my childhood.