Not just a Mother Juno offshoot, Tiger Beat deals in heady and joyous rock primitivism

John Rousseau (né John Welch) began making ripples in the Orlando music scene in 2017. First, it was with their electronic vehicle Mother Juno, perhaps the truest EBM act to come out of the city since the original industrial-music heyday of the 1990s, but Rousseau has since emerged as an underground mover to watch. Alongside Mother Juno’s rising regional profile, Rousseau is also a much-sought studio head who’s worked with eminent area acts like Leatherette, Glove, Body Shop, Audible Parts, Daisy-Chain, Red Rodeo, Warm Frames, Vestis, Fjshwjfe and many more.

Now, Rousseau is making fresh waves with new project Tiger Beat, which just made its recorded debut with double single “Modern Age”/“The Artist.” Tiger Beat is a paean to some of Rousseau’s most formative musical inspirations, and they’re about as antithetical to electronic music as it gets.

A stark contrast to Mother Juno’s mechanistic rigor, Tiger Beat is a revival of the loose rock & roll primitivism that first captured Rousseau’s imagination, influences that reach back to jangly 1960s sounds of the seminal Nuggets compilations and especially the Velvet Underground.

Given those specific bookends and Rousseau’s obsessively studious touch, Tiger Beat’s songs play eerily like unearthed outtakes from the more innocent side of the Velvets catalog. Beyond just a return in style, Tiger Beat’s debut is a return to youth.

Applying a Beat Happening-esque ethos of naiveté to the project, Tiger Beat revels in Rousseau’s open-hearted idolatry and champions the kind of unfiltered musical expression that’s unbound by notions of formality or, for that matter, anything that might inhibit anyone to just play.

Of course, in Rousseau’s literate hands (which played and crafted everything on these recordings), the result ends up being an extraordinary exercise in style with exacting texture and execution.

“Modern Age” and “The Artist” are the first prototypical glimpses of an upcoming full album titled Art Imitates Art, slated for a cassette release through Jacksonville’s Bellicose Records. In following the industrial rigidity of Mother Juno with the raw rock of Tiger Beat, Rousseau is proving to be less of a straightforward genre practitioner and more of a chameleonic and clever conceptualist.

A release date for the full Tiger Beat album isn’t yet set, but “Modern Age” and “The Artist” are on Bandcamp and now atop TLU’s Spotify playlist.

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This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2023.