Words by Farrah Skeiky, photos by Clarissa Villondo
Unfair. This lineup was (and for all future performances, is) absolutely unfair.
Temperatures in DC have just begun to rise. We still need a light jacket to step outside at six o’clock. We still need our winter layers in the mornings. We were ill-prepared for a night of hazy, wistful sounds that enveloped us warmly and beckoned summer’s listless afternoons. And here we were with two bands that have perfected the art of transforming a season inside a room for a couple hours.
Pure X have been a favorite of minute for quite some time. I was expecting something more sensual– blame the heavy rotation of Heavy Air. What we were instead treated to was something much warmer. Pure X understand the auditory equivalent of negative space– they leave room for notes to hang and resound without messily swirling together in overwhelming layers. Angel is quite similar to Heavy Air in that respect, but it fits in much more with this particular tour. Heavy Air was beautiful, but it was hollow and cold. Angel boasts saccharine vocals that don’t croon, and melodies that are minimalistic yet don’t feel that way at all.
Live, this translated to a stunning sense of longing. It’s the kind of summertime sadness Lana Del Rey pretends to know anything about, the feeling of fleeting memories of a distant summer love. 
Compared to Pure X, Real Estate are uptempo. They started their set off with new tracks from Atlas, cracking into their own brand of summertime feelings with Crime and Past Lives before diving into older tracks. No matter how much Real Estate grow as a band, no matter how much they tour, their older material is never left behind. They’ve perfected the art of making old songs feel like new, comfortably at home with recently released tracks. And it’s hard not to love Easy or It’s Real, but it takes a special breed of musician to bring Perfect Swimmers up to speed with the rest.
In fact, Real Estate proved in this set that they can make anything feel like home in their performance– even a brief cover of Iron Man in the encore. Really. Sandwiched between Navigator and Beneath the Dunes, they truly made it their own. They could have easily chosen any Sabbath song and made it their own.
What Real Estate do best is capture the highs and lows of summer. They set the soundtrack to listless days spent in perfect weather doing nothing in particular, and they revive the feelings of anxiety creep up as you realize you’ve wasted days on end. But better than that, they flawlessly remind you of what it feels like to wake up late, frantically run around town all day with friends in haze and humidity, and completely lose track of time until you realize it’s already one in the morning. It’s the best kind of anxiety possible.
I still hold, however, that it’s unfair to throw us into the emotions of summer for a couple of hours, only to spit us back out into the chilly nighttime air of DC. Just a taste is not enough.
More Pure X:
