Features

Real Estate: Group at Work

After college, Martin Courtney found himself back in suburban New Jersey with no job and a stack of songs ready to record. Luckily, he wasn’t the only one who drifted home after graduation. “We all moved back in 2008 and started a band because that’s what we’ve always done,” says Courtney, who grew up in the shadow of Manhattan playing everything from punk, ska and classic rock to Phish covers with Alex Bleeker (bass) and Matthew Mondanile (guitar). “We were listening to a lot of Grateful Dead after college and a lot of soft rock like Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac. That was part of the whole idea originally—to be influenced by cheesier ‘70s music and bring it up to date.”

Along with drummer Etienne Pierre Duguay, the musicians reconvened under the name Real Estate and quickly settled in on a breezy, lo-fi style of psych that included elements of retro-surf rock, modern indie and classic Grateful Dead. “I was responsible for getting Martin into Phish in high school,” says Bleeker, who Courtney describes as the band’s “resident hippie.”

“When we were first getting Real Estate together, we all agreed that there were elements of [the jamband genre] that we wanted to incorporate into our style.” The band released its self-titled debut album in 2009 on Woodsist Records—founded by fellow psych-rock Deadhead Jeremy Earl of the band Woods—and slowly became an unofficial house band at New York-based D.I.Y. promoter Todd P’s various psych-friendly underground venues.

Like their Woodsist companions, the members of Real Estate are currently at the center of a micro-scene that includes Mondanile’s one-man project Ducktails and Bleeker’s Crazy Horse-inspired solo band. The group also continues to experiment in the studio and released the mature single “Out of Tune” on True Panther this fall. “We’re trying to get it to sound a little more hi-fi,” Courtney says of the band’s latest recordings. “One of our newer songs sounds a lot like Fleetwood Mac. So if anything, we’re moving back in that original direction.”