4 out of 5

Label: Secretly Canadian

Produced by: LonPaul Ellrich

Lo-fi creepy cool strumsters Marmoset offer up a ‘minialbum’ of eight songs, and nearly as many blissfully misleadingly simple-minded mini-masterpieces.

Between co-vocalists Jorma Whittaker and Dave Jablonski – here recorded in dusty fidelity by LonPaul Ellrich, equally adept at capturing drummer Jason Cavan’s loose but punctuating beats – Marmoset step through their general modes of slowed down acoustic sketches and jangly pop, landing in a perfect middleground that can turn covers like ‘I’m in Love’ into obsessive odes; ideas that would equate to tossed-off prose in other singer-songwriters’ hands – the missed connection of I’m Always Too Late – into dark and complex studies, somehow enhanced by the bare guitar / bass / drums, less-than-three-minutes-per-song presentation. This has, to our benefit, always been the group’s trade, but it’s boiled down to something quite precise here, stripped of more wandering, incidental songs so that nearly each track has an emotional kick to it. The instrumental track that kicks things off is an effective part of that, calmly setting the tone o the group can get down to business thereafter. Tonally, there’s a touch of repetition, particularly between the more upbeat numbers, but that’s likely only noticeable because of the album’s briefness. Otherwise, this is the Marmoset disc I tend to return to the most, fully representative of their sound and their strengths.