Ugly Music for Beautiful People

One of my favorite scenes going on today is the loosely defined, but closely knit, mid-western folk-punk scene. There’s a ton of great songwriters and there is a pretty good variety in style among them. There’s a definite Plan-It-X Records influence in the extreme DIY nature of the scene, but it doesn’t have as much of the stereotypically punk signifiers. Most of the people in that scene don’t write political songs and they’re more likely to cover Cat Power or Will Oldham than This Bike is Not a Pipe Bomb.

But when most of the shows they play are at people’s houses and most of the releases are handmade CD-Rs, you can’t help but call it punk. For a scene that is important as this one, there is a shocking lack of internet presence. Music bloggers have largely passed it over. I guess it’s not a particularly trendy sounding style, and most of the musicians seem to avoid any promotion, so it’s not surprising that it has largely gone below the radar of the blogerati. Still, I think that these kids (and most of them are kids) are doing something important, both musically and culturally. They are reaching a growing number of people just by playing living rooms, puppet theaters and the occasional dive bar. And it is a very inclusive, positive and reinforcing scene which is a large part of why it’s growing so quickly.

So I’m going to try to regularly feature different musicians from this scene. I’ve already talked about Sam King, who got me into this whole thing. But the man I should probably have started with is Tony Presley aka Real Live Tigers. He’s from Texas, but he tours non-stop and has set up a lot of the touring connections that the other people follow. The biggest sign of how important he is to this growing scene is how often you’ll here people cover his songs at shows. Apparently somebody was even trying to put together a RLT tribute album.

I’ve been told that Tony is related to Elvis Presley. I am going to believe that. Not because he sounds like Elvis, because he doesn’t. He has a chopped almost sing/speak voice that sounds like he’s gasping for breath. I am going to believe it because it is cool.

Real Live Tigers already has an extensive discography, most of which is handmade CD-R releases. He does a new proper album coming out. It’s called This is Sometimes a Riverbed and it’s on Sanitary Records. It’s excellent and will hopefully bring him his fair share of acclaim. I really like the songs “Beard of Bees” and “On Our Way”. I am also posting “Let the Things You Love Kill You”, which is from an EP. It’s number 1 in the Alphabet Soup Series, a series of EPs put out by MASA records.

Real Live Tigers - Beard of Bees (from This is Sometimes a Riverbed)
Real Live Tigers - On Our Way (from This is Sometimes a Riverbed)
Real Live Tigers - Let the Things You Love Kill You (from “Alphabet Soup Series #1 EP”)
If you want to get any of his releases, I’d try sending him a Myspace message.