Sunny Day Real Estate
The Rising Tide

"The Rising Tide" is definitely the most beautiful album by Sunny Day Real Estate (henceforth SDRE). Consequently, it is a milestone of the second wave Emo-Rock, the '90s easy listening marked and close to the mainstream.

In here you find depths and heights, melancholy and anger, frustration and aggressiveness, all in an epic projection. The cover image is an excellent example of this.

It is the year 2000. After the split with Nat Mendel (now with Grohl's Foo Fighters), the SDRE are Jeremy Enigk, Will Goldsmith (also Foo Fighters), and Dan Hoerner, another guitarist... in reality, little else by now.

In this album, where Enigk and his project emerge vigorously, the art of the frontman finds the necessary balance through a mild filter of old companions, but without the cumbersome Mendel. The absence of the latter is beneficial. Despite limited means, the sounds are the absolute best, the production shines, and SDRE's art reaches its highest degree. For this reason, probably, the album has remained too long forgotten and needs to be rediscovered.

From the first track to the last, you will find yourself navigating an ever-growing sea of emotions until the splendid finale of the title track. Indeed, water is the main element of the album. Watery is the color of the cover, fluid are the atmospheres, and watery, regressive, and maternal is the desire to find the center of man.

"Killed by an Angel" is the opening track, necessary to reassure the more timid and lazy listeners. Here the band displays their technical skills in a professional rock. A demonstration of sound cohesion, appointments, counterpoints, and grand sounds, sharp but well-produced, never heard on SDRE's albums, strongly Indie until now.

With "One", the emotional tournament begins. We let ourselves be guided by Jeremy Enigk (pronounced "inek") and his falsetto over the first waves, initially on the impetuous shore and then slowly on the first midsea breakers. William Goldsmith (today Foo Fighters) adds some cymbals to vary a motif that returns like the image of foam on the waves. Here the guitars overlap to give depth to the parts of greater intensity.

In "Rain Song", we find the landing, and while the rain beats on the shore, still wet we shelter at the first wooden checkpoint of the rescue. Maybe we light a nice fire. A carpet of strings gently accompanies the still accelerated pulsation of the deeper percussion. Enigk sends us to rest for a few minutes, accompanying us with the reassuring sound of his folk guitar's rosewood.

"Disappear" chases us again in a race of conflicting emotions. An ironic smile alternates with the desire to return to the womb, to oblivion. The chorus is an explosion of realization and joy, one can only shout: "deep inside a song a thousand miles away/every moment the start of a greater day/running to a field a world we'll find".

"Snibe" is the most intriguing and raw piece of the album, the watershed between the first cycle of adolescent pieces and the second, intimate and truer. It is the piece of disillusionment.

We start again from zero, from Mother Earth, from "The Ocean". A magnificent lullaby, a sweet awakening (try it as an alarm). Guitar inlays and a solo bass that designs the main riff. The finale will lift you mid-air, on Enigk's strings.

It's not over, on the contrary: the humid undergrowth of "Fool in The Photograph" still awaits us. Images of an infinite and infinitely wrong search, of what is truest and deepest inside us: "wasting time, you tell the story/some kind of magic/I've waited here all too long".

From our miseries, the voice of a mother in "Tearing in my Heart" saves us for a moment. And in recognizing our definitive mistakes once again, we redeem ourselves.

With "Television", we take a sigh of relief. Perhaps the only real aporia of the record, in the position it holds. At once an invitation to face once more the ultimate recesses of emotions that penetrate the musical textures and a premature conclusion of a deep listening.

The final crescendo is marked by Enigk's light whispers and a soft pace... "Faces in Disguise" is the tale of a unique encounter. At the end, we find ourselves on the first peak... the tide has grown suddenly, almost without feeling the predictable passions.

From that peak, we proceed on the crest and discover that we can go beyond, be more: "Will you escape your life with all the walls you build?" "The Rising Tide" is a challenge to start the challenge again on the highest tide. Are you ready to start again from the first track? I am.