Real Life Buildings are back, but it’s not all good news. New album Ohio and West is likely their last. But that’s okay too, because it seems like the band, led by Matthew Van Asselt, feel like now is a good time to call it a day.
If you’re unfamiliar with Real Life Buildings, previous album Significant Weather is a good starting point. In our review, we described the album as “a fun indie rock record and a lesson in paying attention to what’s going on both inside and outside your head.” Van Asselt’s writing is fundamental to this detailing “quiet, everyday, scenes [which act] as backdrops to a rich internal life, small practical thoughts mixed up with big philosophical ones,” where his “matter of fact descriptions of a snow day fli[p] into metaphors on dreams and relationships.”
Ironically, it took the threat of losing the ability to make music to forces outside of his control for Van Asselt to come to the decision willingly. A series of emergency surgeries last spring left his vocals cords in a bad way, meaning he couldn’t even speak above a whisper, let alone sing. “During my time in the hospital, though, I made peace with it. I felt fine – even good – about music,” he describes. “I also felt good about stepping back from singing and performing my own songs. Writing music never felt like a choice that I made, even participating in DIY never really felt like a choice. So it’s perhaps ironic that in that moment when my ability was really being decided for me, it felt like all of a sudden I had a choice to sit down.”
Van Asselt had already made one last Real Life Buildings album, a record which in retrospect hints at decisions to come. Ohio and West is an album that confronts “a feeling of being stuck, and of being frustrated of wanting something more of myself and of others.” This is all captured on lead single ‘Bitter’, a song that forgoes any sort of traditional song structure, opening with manic scrappy guitar before unfolding into big fuzzy expanses and moments of near-silence. “Maybe everything here is no longer for us,” Van Asselt wonders, “but I guess in the end I’m just another voice in the chorus, saying ‘I want something else’.”
But again ironically, many of the anxieties and frustrations the album explores have since been solved, both by coming to terms with the whole making music thing, and by moving from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh (and setting up the very cool screenprinting workspace, Pullproof Studio). But this doesn’t make the album void or irrelevant. Real Life Buildings have always made music about movement and cycles, from seasons and weather patterns to the unpredictable structures of the songs themselves, and Ohio and West feels like watching these cycles rotate in retrospect.
Opener ‘Road Block’ throws us straight into the band’s trademark blend of the thoughtful and unpredictable. Lyrically, the song feels like a stepping stone between previous albums and this one, combining musings on validation and restless anticipation and the kind of winter weather imagery that was so important on Significant Weather and It Snowed. Everything we’ve grown to love about Real Life Buildings is present, the song veering between a fluttery punk rock rush and an altogether more intimate hush, Van Asselt mumbling earnest lyrics backed with just subtle percussion and snaking guitar.
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Seasonal imagery is used again on ‘Backwards Glance’, a track that confronts how we often spend our time pining for something else, the absurdity of forever complaining about being too hot in summers and too cold in winters both literal and metaphorical. The passage of time is also the focus of ‘A Mark on the Wall’, although in this instance across a lifetime rather than annually. But as well as anxieties over getting older, the song uses a songwriting metaphor to talk about that fleeting magic that sometimes seems to spread its fingers across everything. “There is a chorus,” Van Asselt sings, “there is a place where somehow everything comes together – everybody knows just what to say.”
There’s an almost post-rock vibe on the first half of ‘Racing the Sun’, sparsely melodic guitar and lazy percussion falling off a cliff edge of blown-out fuzz and battered drums. Once that’s subsided shared vocals emerge, giving the song an Act Of Estimating as Worthless vibe while delivering gentle yet cathartic lines about perspective and contentment, backed with a rousing drop into more loud guitar.
You said productivity and happiness
mean two different things
and sure there’s a relationship
but it’s important to remember
you don’t need this
just making the drive is a reason in itself
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‘168’ is a rollicking folk punk song about new trains and double parked u-hauls, while ‘An Expectation’ is a mumbled acoustic track about getting priorities straight. There’s an unpredictability again on ‘Irony’, a song that languishes in calm lulls and sweeps into fuzzy punk rock, full of self doubt and nods to being a musician (“I should have settled for just two chords / restricted my rambling in favor of a melody).
In that way, the song acts as the perfect embodiment of the record as a whole. As Van Asselt describes, “[the album] is about music and about cycles: the movement through a song, only to be followed by another song, the ups and downs of touring, time passing, trying again.” But if anything is clear after listening to Ohio and West, it’s that these cycles are not only ever-changing but part of a bigger process, one that sometimes isn’t for us to question. “Maybe if you don’t think about it,” goes the final line of closer ‘A Different Place’, “it will all fall into place.”
Ohio and West is out now on Lauren Records and you can get it from the Real Life Buildings Bandcamp page.