Review Summary: we're lost
It could be subconscious but sometimes I'll drive 15 or so miles out of my way to the town where I met my first love, really the only girl I've cared about in my life that was outside the realm of sex and lust. I'm not really sure what I'm expecting to find; after all, everytime I drive there it's always the same. I'll look around to see if maybe this
one time I'll see her standing there, as shocked to see me as I am to see her. It's strange and exciting, almost like playing hide and seek with a ghost. Maybe it's just a way of feeling something, a little escape from the mundane, but it doesn't really matter: she's never there. But I'll keep going, maybe a little less often every year that passes, because for some reason hope is still there. I always leave disappointed, but I'll return regardless. I blame fate, but in reality it's just a way of holding onto the past to depart from the present.
Days is kind of like that; a shimmering hope that the theory is true that time spirals back in on itself. It isn't an ode to the past as much as it is a longing for it, yet we're always brought back crashing into the here and now, flames put out.
Days is warm and comforting and herein lies the essential contradiction; it's a happy album about sadness. Real Estate spend these 10 melodically sunny tracks suggesting heaven and when they get there and find nothing but themselves older, it's devastating. There's no soulmate, just the same run-down town she grew up in, with half the Main st. stores closed and unshoveled snow on the sidewalks. Yet there's solace here, knowing nothing changes and yet everything does. "
I'm not ok, but I guess I'm doing fine" Martin Courtney dispassionately croons in the melancholic "Wonder Years". By going backwards, Real Estate have somehow found the crucial zenith at the center of this generation's heart:
we're lost.
