TIGER WAVES: ONLY GOOD BANDS HAVE ANIMAL NAMES [FREE EP]

Tiger Waves (@tigerwaves) delivers an urgent folk-pop single with “It Could Never Stop” — a pleasant track from the Chicago/Austin-based, laid back psychedelic surf band. With significant undertones of competent electro backing and revivalist rock, their latest song takes fans from an idyllic, beach paradise of smooth guitar and melodic vocals to a melancholic and ephemeral breakdown and subversion of surf rock.

The track sounds so similar to a Beach Boys/Phil Spectre amalgamation that fans might be lulled into a comfortable expectation that the song will follow a predefined, but tenuous, pattern of romantically resolved surf rock. The best aspect of the song, though, is the way it disintegrates this form — the melodies slowly melt into one another, the guitars gradually draw feedback from their anxiety, the piano eventually gets swallowed by the indifference of the songwriter and the overarching narrative is one of causal nausea. Listeners are drawn in by their dulcet 70s relativism, idealistic and sunny melodies, but ultimately impressed by the overall subversion of a genre they clearly feel strongly for.