The Jersey boys from Real Estate make a dawdling kind of rock, all loping chords and stray melodies that weave in and out of consciousness (that’s right, these melodies possess sentience.) Beneath the band’s burbling but bright sound lies Alex Bleeker’s sturdy basslines. They are the stiff back, low in the mix but necessary. They organize and contain what could become a wayward mess. Bleeker (that’s him seated above) and his band, The Freaks, is basically Real Estate in reverse. Guitarist Matt Mondanile plays drums here and frontman Martin Courtney IV is on bass, while fellow Jersey-ian (-ite? -ist? -er?) Julian Lynch handles guitar duties. But there is nothing particularly guided about this band, either. They are on their own time, extending songs past five minutes, chugging out solos and then disappearing like that. Alex Bleeker and the Freaks was released in a limited run last fall, just in time to catch a glimmer of phony lo-fi praise, but Real Estate’s in-house label, Underwater Peoples, was only recently added at eMusic, and so it’s here now.
And what a gorgeous record it is, distilling the best parts of (go with me on this) the Grateful Dead—pastoral, high drama guitar work—with achingly faithful odes to Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Their cover of Mountain Man’s “Animal Tracks,” all singed solos and pitched-off falsetto, is like a long lost track from Zuma. “Common Sense” is a high-strung country ballad, too Eastern to draw comparisons to the crucial ’70s symphonies of pain by Willie Nelson, but similarly devoid of hope or esteem. “I hope this isn’t my last chance,” Bleeker sings, before a torrent of reverbing guitar cranes down. The opening dyad, “Summer > Epilogue,” grazes for three minutes, building steam before unfurling something bolder and fuller. It’s the best thing here.
What Alex Bleeker and The Freaks has in common with Real Estate’s far more acclaimed debut from last year is an ethic. (Well, that and three members and a sonic palette and a label and a hometown.) But this album, like Real Estate, is glacial in the unhurried way suburban life always seems to be. There is nothing frantic about residential New Jersey, so little seems to be on the line on a day-to-day basis. Soloing, stretching, luxuriating in the sound is encouraged because, really, what else are you gonna do with your time? Go spend some of yours with this.
“Spring Jam” is SUCH a good song – it’s an onomatopoeia of the musical variety. If there is such a thing. If there isn’t, the folks that make up such things haven’t heard this song. Their loss.