You probably have to be a dyed- in- the- wool indie kid to truly love Tsunami. I'll admit that I missed jumping on the bandwagon the first few times around, since I'm a little skeptical of bands that garner acclaim more through social/political associations than musicianship. From the outside looking in, you can't help but think that a lot of Tsunami's good press is related to the fact that frontwomen Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson run their own ultra-hip label, Simple Machines. Sound like a readymade "women in rock" cover story from 1993? Unlike Courtney Love, though, Toomey and Thomson are the real thing: college-educated punks who dress sensibly and are actually serious about the DIY ethic they espouse.

Which brings us A Brilliant Mistake, Tsunami's third album proper (not counting a B-sides compilation) and the first in three years. A bit poppier and more jangly than the swoony guitar wash of their previous album The Heart's Tremolo, Mistake finds Toomey wrestling with her status as indie deity, suffering naive indie idealists and greedy corporate suits alike. Bad idea to mix business with pleasure. Her lyric sheet contains cringeworthy lines like "I lost my taste for expense account feasts when I felt the brace of a corporate leash." Gee, Jenny, we already know how punk you are and how much of a hassle it can be to live up to your lofty principles. Yelling "Is that all we get for cutting against the grain?" won't get you any more gratitude than you think you deserve.

I shouldn't sound so mean, but raging against the machine, however eloquently, comes off as complaint-rock no matter how upbeat the melodies are. Peppy fuzz bursts like "Great Mimes" and "Double Shift" would be so much nicer without Toomey's indier- than- thou pronouncements. Not surprisingly, the more tolerable songs on A Brilliant Mistake are the ones where she's not railing against "the business." The slightly silly girl-power anthem "Poodle" paints a great picture of a woman commandeering a sled of the titular dogs in the Iditarod, and "Unbridled" is a breathless, joyous rush of distortion that lives up to its title. But then there's filler that, while interesting as musical exercise, only serves to disrupt the flow of the album. The aimless spoken-word narrative "David Foster Wallace" (irony, perhaps?) and the dissonant, hobbling "The Workers Are Punished" are two of the worst offenders in this category. I want to like Tsunami, I really do, but Toomey's smug lyricism sours the good musical hooks, making for an album less brilliant and more mistake.

-Nick Mirov