There Is A Storm That Sleeps Inside Us

"Twenty-five some-odd years ago, punk rock hit the floor and skittered into a thousand pieces. Some pieces were mostly form, some mostly content, some governed by self-styled ethics, some given to reckless abandon. In my mind, Tony Presley's Real Live Tigers is a piece of that scattered world. He's on tour more than he's not, in basements and buses, mostly, setting him squarely in the circuit of DIY punk and indie music. He sings candid, frank, uncompromised words, in deliberately pared down phrasings: below even his speaking range, too declarative to be conversational, too straightforward to be romantic, too serious to be engaged at anything less than full attention. His newest collection of songs, There Is A Storm That Sleeps Inside Us, is documentation of this. Presley's spare, unembellished guitar turns on a dime from square and simple chording to near-evaporated murmurs to near-out-time/out-of-tune hammering; an apt stage for such arrested but resonant vocal gestures.

Lyrically, Presley confesses/acknowledges/romanticizes aspects of his day to day, either in direct narration or in allegory. This isn't bedroom rock. It's music made by a guy who's seen a lot of highway, a lot of stages, a lot of people; who's let go of home, a car, day jobs... What fascinates me is that where many of the DIY solo-ists I've seen co-opt a sort of punk Irish drinking song aesthetic as the vehicle for their narrations, and at optimum performance generate a room full of sanguine sing-alonging, Tony's on the back porch of that party, risking a revealing one-on-one conversation with a near-stranger. In his songs, the Life is realer: simultaneously lighter and heavier, stronger and more fragile."

-from Samuel Taylor King's blog

"Real Live Tigers is the blues. There aren’t any A-minor, pentatonic guitar solos or B.B. King borrowed riffs, but instead a true sense of being beaten and relying on those around you for whatever kind of help they can give you and giving back in the name of friendship. With a voice like Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening, Halo Benders), simple guitar, and bathroom production the experience is raw and natural for the morning after."

-from Buzzgrinder.com