Let’s start with a dichotomy, false as any other, but this one describing what feels to me like a natural response to Matt Mondanile’s new Ducktails album and its relation to the music of his main band, Real Estate. So, there are two ways to walk through town to the Ernie Pyle branch of the local public library. The first and better route is through a neighborhood as quiet and uninhabited as a museum exhibit of itself, and the other is down Central Avenue, where you’ll encounter all the town’s activity and automobile noise and people with ideas about culture and progress. The neighborhood route might seem like a big stretch of nothing, but it also might overwhelm you, when you find yourself wanting to photograph every small pink house, shadow, dead tree, all the neat chaos and blue negative space, like Georgia O’Keeffe spending a lifetime trying to comprehend the beauty of one wall. The avenue route, meanwhile, provides more sensory information, but it’s all distraction, diminishing your impulse to stare infinitely at the itching beauty of your not-quite-graspable immediate environment.
End tangent. More cultured but less important than the music of Real Estate, which lives in the tension of too much beauty and the question of its permanence, Ducktails’ The Flower Lane is merely pretty, the distracted walk to Real Estate’s overwhelmed one. “What do the street lights say to your eyes?” Mondanile asks on “Under Cover,” and his own answer must be sweet relief from the too sweet world. Whether or not an actual flower lane figures in this album’s origins, I might rename it The Building Lane: man leaves home for the city, empties out his brain, hears new sounds, plays with friends (the other excellent New Jersey crew, Big Troubles, join him as a backing band), loses himself in a world whose constant change is not his own concern.
But none of this is apparent when The Flower Lane opens, “Ivy Covered House” sounding initially like it could’ve been intended for Real Estate, with a number of calm intertwining guitar lines, none asserting dominance. It’s only when another springs forth with a different kind of luxury at the 33-second mark, more insistently expressive, that the lush, wide pop world the album inhabits comes into view. “Under Cover,” then, is the album’s centerpiece, insular, sweet and steady in a surprising, even after recalibrated expectations, light disco mode. “Do you want to go under the covers?” Mondanile asks more than once, and what he’s offering is lovely and inviting, but the song only becomes great, a bit ridiculous even, when it offers so much else during its long instrumental passages. There’s a big gonzo guitar solo, reverb-heavy sax bleats, neat jazz fusion inserts straight out of Frank Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia.” If you’re paying little enough attention it all just melts into the groove and sounds nice and unremarkable, but if you refuse the covers for a while you can hear the crazy, courageous endeavor for what it is.
By the time the song reaches a threshold of accumulated energy and ends, every single element has it totally sold, Mondanile’s seductive vocals included. On other songs, less breathy, his weirdly shaped voice recalls Mitch Easter, Tobin Sprout, Lee Ranaldo, all those guys who might not be remembered as major leading men but who can re-center sympathies on something soft and slightly helium whenever they’re singing. Then, on “Planet Phrom,” Mondanile wears the croaky and content voice of Dean Wareham, overseeing tiny, tiny hours music. But his vocals are a fairly minor feature on Flower Lane (he’s just as likely to assign the singing duties to his friends from Big Troubles, Cults, etc.), understandable for a guy whose sole songwriting credit on the last Real Estate album was the instrumental “Kinder Blumen.” Real Estate’s instrumentals have often been among their most rigorously composed songs, and that song’s leisurely but intentional progression of chords stands as a perfect blueprint of the band’s melodic patterning. So it’s funny that the lone instrumental on Flower Lane, “International Date Line,” gains its effect not from horizontal development but from steadily applied amplification. But what’s not surprising is that it, too, ends up celebrating a kind of modesty: Just when it seems ready to untether from gravity and benefit from its considerable momentum, it fades out at the two-minute mark.
Ducktails has been understood as the experimental bedroom side project to Real Estate’s more accessible and classic main attraction, but whether or not that was ever true, it strikes me as somewhat the opposite now. On Days, Real Estate offered personal investigations of what was closest at hand, while the full band iteration of Ducktails offer a more current and comprehensible recycle of sounds. I know it’s unfair to put Flower Lane in competition with Days, one of the really miraculous albums of recent years, and every definitive statement here is only relative. Flower Lane, freed from a heavy context, is not shallow, empty, and it suffers no lack of truly memorable moments. “Academy Avenue,” in particular, is a skeletal song idea given a beautiful shell, and some part of its amorphous, continually renewing rhythm makes it really linger. It’s wisely been placed at the end of the album, so that the rest of the songs benefit in memory from its glow. “On Academy Avenue, across the street from your house, a couple strolls hand in hand,” Mondanile sings, a nice echo of “the house where you live now” from the album’s opening song. That’s a tender moment, but a lot of Flower Lane’s prettiness just isn’t painful enough. The first song on Days was called “Easy,” but something in its lovely rush inspired uneasiness, alarm. The problem, finally, maybe a minor one, is that there are too few moments on Flower Lane where “easy” means anything other than exactly what it’s supposed to.
