I was sitting outside Portland, Ore.'s Someday Lounge two nights ago following an incredible live performance by London's The Real Tuesday Weld when Stephen Coates—main man behind the band—told me he wasn't afraid of death. "My experience of death has been really positive," he told me. "When my father died he wasn't scared—he was completely fortunate about the time he had here."

Clearly Coates—an exceptionally talented musician, artist and filmmaker—is making the most of his time here. Following art school and, later, a four-month stint living in a Buddhist monastery (a brief fling with enlightenment), Coates began penning songs that combined the lounge-y old time-y jazz sounds of his youth with the electronic, pop and experimental noise modernity brought him. The result is undeniably engaging and beautifully mystifying—listening to The Real Tuesday Weld feels like living in an old movie where you're constantly falling in and out of love, reaching new heights and stumbling to new lows. Coates' songs simultaneously break your heart and mend it. "My experience of life is always between comic and tragic," Coates explained. "I'm interested in capturing the balance between the two."

Something that is evident in Real Tuesday's stellar live performance, which is, true to the definition of the word, indeed a performance. Backed by an enormous screen showing black and white clips from '40s era films carefully edited to coincide with each song, Coates radiates an electric stage presence that adds, like the jittery films, an enticing layer to the set, whose warmth and thickness is made possible by Coates' mates, a drummer, bassist, guitarist and clarinetist (all of whom wear dress shirts and slacks, providing a slick and shaded sort of backdrop). Donning a retro navy blue, large-collared sports jacket, black slacks and shined-on dress shoes, Coates stumbles, slouches, crouches and stomps about the stage with desperate crazed eyes like a man so tired of falling in and out of love he's on the verge of giving up. Yet his performance, which involves a microphone and an Apple Power Book, doesn't come without a good dose of humor and playful interaction with the crowd. Frequently throughout the show, Coates picks a girl from the sparsely populated audience to focus on as if the song were meant for her. He looks deep into her eyes and then suddenly turns on her: "I don't get my kicks out of you, I don't feel the way I used to," Coates croons and hisses like a '50s lounge singer on the song "Kix" with its swinging rhythms and piping clarinet. "I know it's bad after what we've had, but I'm just not the angel you knew."

The Real Tuesday Weld have released five albums in the ten years since Coates began writing songs out of a love for the hushed and crackling sound of old jazz records and the modern capacities of laptop manipulations and Euro-pop. Most of his songs, particularly those on 2004's I, Lucifer and last year's London Book Of The Dead, are about love—cynical love, the problems with love, the dark side of love. "One minute it's like everybody's dancing and the next they're weeping," Coates told me, describing the true-to-life contrasts in his songs. "It's totally ridiculous," he added with a laugh, "I never set out to create music. I had no plan. I guess it was more for therapy in the beginning."

Coates never says how his father died and he doesn't go into much detail about his time in the monastery. Still, he reveals an interest in transcendence, dream interpretation (Carl Jung) and embracing death without fear. "I want to make a whole album about death—a album full of positive songs about death," he said. "I don't believe in God but I feel really fortunate to have been around."

"Life is good when you're filled with blood, life is good when you're filled with love," is how Coates opens and closes London Book Of The Dead. And I want to add that life is good when you have music like Coates' around.