Tea Tornado

Indianapolis indie rockers Marmoset are the relative you don't mind having visit for the weekend. They come in softly, warm up the room with fuzzy and familiar vibes, give you a few micro-memories, then move on before you tire of them. Tea Tornado, the trio's fourth proper full-length release of their 14 year existence, is a return to the glory of their first two records, almost as if 2007's sometimes frustrating and confusing Florist Fired never happened. The songs are again retro and brief, coming off like a slacker/garage version of a Wire/Swell Maps supergroup.

Unlike Guided by Voices, who also made short, Brit-rock influenced indie pop, Marmoset craft their songs carefully, using the most of the two or so minutes their songs average in runtime. The devout 60s vibe of Record In Red (the band's signature album) isn't as important here as it once was to the group before 2009. They lean on the past carefully, presenting their own timeless cool - which is to say that they're not too cool to make instantly hummable pop songs, but are cool enough to make sure everything they do is anything but ordinary. Similar to Wire or even a Spoon record like Kill the Moonlight, Jorma Whittaker, Dave Jablonski and Jason Cavan take one of perhaps the most difficult approaches to pop music over Tea Tornado's 14 tracks, using minimalist songs that always surprise with their strange yet simple ideas. It's the kind of record that leaves similar sounding musicians scratching their heads, asking "why didn't I think of that?"