I once made a pledge to myself I was going to stop writing about music in reference to seasons. The 'summer jam' had become such a persistent cliché that it seemed way too easy, and too lazy, to merely associate songs with weather; to hear major keys and upbeat melodies and think of the sun in the sky.
Yet, for those in the temperate Northern Hemisphere, summer is currently giving way to autumn —or, if you must go for literalism over poetry, Fall— and all those late, sweaty, bare-skinned nights spent wandering empty streets half-drunk are, suddenly, already feeling like mythical memories; nostalgia for things that happened six-weeks-ago piquant and poignant.
And here comes "Green Aisles," where Jersey fuzz-rock types Real Estate stretch out with five minutes of melancholy meditation, buoyed by a guitar tone that could easily —poetically— be called autumnal. "Under bright-lit skies/under thousands of maple leaves/standing side-by-side," Martin Courtney carols. "The houses were humming all through the night/the winter was coming, but that was alright."
The song's a paean to wasted nights and wasted hours, about traveling under street-lights and canopies of leaves, by bicycle, in cars, on foot. The lyrical motifs of traveling are perfectly pushed forward by the overlapping guitar licks, whose patterns carry their own sense of momentum, of movement.
"Green Aisles" is the second song to be taken from Real Estate's forthcoming second record, and it's certainly more evocative than the two minute chug of the first, "It's Real." It hopefully augurs well for the LP, which is called Days. On first blanch, that's a banal title, but seen through the prism of "Green Aisles"' autumnal light, it suddenly rings profound. This song is about that feeling of days passing away, life going by. Seasons changing, and, in turn, moods, too.
Real Estate "Green Aisles"
Comments