JOYFUL NOISE RECORDS
2009
Tea Tornado
About This Album
"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.
Track List (try tracks 3,5,8 and 11)

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