I‘ve been doing the shallow water through the voluminous 2006 South by Southwest mp3 catalog (available as torrent file here) for about a month now (the conference ended two weeks ago) and I’ve made it as far as “T.” I’ve uncovered some good stuff so far, stuff I hope to revisit and write about at a later date, but I may be stuck on “T” for a while. Not only because this is where a bunch of bands whose names start with “The” reside, but because I’m too busy grooving out to The Real Heroes.

Hailing from Austin, TRH didn’t have far to drive to get to SXSW but they had even shorter trek to bury themselves in my brain. Their music is a dramatic departure from the alt-country singer-songwriter stuff you might expect from the Texas capitol – We Can Do Better, their SXSW featured track, summons the swaggering specters of early David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the Sweet. You half expect them to carry on at the end of the song by rolling right into Ballroom Blitz.

While musically some of this isn’t that different from some of The Darkness‘ latest output, it’s more in line with what Daniel Bejar (Destroyer) has been working on for the past decade. There’s dashes of Ray Davies, sprinkles of Cheap Trick, maybe even a drop or two of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in there.

We Can Do Better, which I suspect is off their yet to be released, yet to be named third album, almost sounds like an answer to Bowie’s Heroes. We can be heroes just for one day? Fuck that. We can do better.

Lead singer, Benjamin Hotchkiss once said he wants to make records that are “growers”, records that take root and blossom in your brain upon repeated listens. Well most of the tracks available for download on TRH’s website grow like Audrey II.

• Listen to We Can Do Better.
• Listen to Kiss the Mechanic.
• Listen to Move That Strut.

Buy Greetings from Russia from