01. Written Today ( 2:00)
02. Empty Room ( 2:53)
03. Strawberry Shortcakes ( 2:22)
04. Hes Been Napping ( 1:53)
05. Come With Me ( 2:53)
06. Toy ( 1:58)
07. Hallway ( 1:59)
08. Peach Cobbler ( 1:49)
09. Musing ( 2:06)
10. Gretchen ( 1:51)
11. Run Away Teri ( 1:11)
12. You Blueberry Muffin ( 2:39)
13. I Love My Things ( 2:54)
14. Oh Dear Handlebars ( 3:19)
"You can't understand my evil/It hides in the depths of my grey matter,"
sings Jorma Whittaker on Tea Tornado, and he's right: years after Marmoset's
compulsively oddball debut, Today It's You, the band's collision of
super-simple melodies and cryptic charm remains as mysterious as ever. That
oddness is a blessing and a curse, sometimes delivering delightfully bent art
pop and other times serving up riddles whose answers are locked away in the
band's brains. However, on Tea Tornado, Marmoset downplay that
unpredictability a tad more than they did on Florist Fired. The sprightly
snotty "Written Today," "Hallway"'s Anglophile garage rock, and the darkly
catchy "Come with Me" -- which plays like late-'80s-style college rock never
went away -- are all remarkably direct, providing guideposts for the stranger
moments that inevitably follow. A fruit motif runs through some of the
album's best songs, if only tangentially -- "Strawberry Shortcakes"'
irresistible start-and-stop bassline and vaguely threatening singsong vocals
make it a quintessential Marmoset song. On "Peach Cobbler," Whittaker seems
to boil longing down to its purest essence, singing "You are pretty, you are
strong and you are funny" before slipping into absurdity: "And I am the boy
who found you/And turned it into peach cobbler." He sounds just as devoted on
the chiming "You, Blueberry Muffin." Yet not all of Tea Tornado's weirdness
is writ large. "Toy" and "Gretchen" are whispery yet angular, with just
enough strangeness to keep from disappearing entirely. With winding tracks
like these and "Empty Room," Marmoset are more entitled than almost any other
band to have a song called "Musing." The album has only a couple of
full-scale freakouts -- which, in some ways, makes them even freakier. "He's
Been Napping" may or may not be about the strangest disco nap ever, and "Run
Away, Teri" mashes odd bits of spoken (and screaming) word and oddly wistful
guitar together in a way that's not accessible but is somehow catchy despite
everything. "Oh' Dear Handlebars" closes the album with slow-motion mischief
that's more than a little unsettling, and a lot Marmoset. At its best, Tea
Tornado plays like a more concise Today It's You, and a decade on, they're
still as much of an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery
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