In this era of nu-twee, you can suddenly think of something as "twee" without assuming it's also "embarrassing." Partially this is because instead of playing regular music badly (and un-aggressively) like the K Records crew of yore, bands like the Decemberists and the Danielsen Famile sound like an ensemble of precocious middle-school band students, competent and clean. More importantly, their lyrics avoid golden-age twee's boldfaced juvenilia for more diaphanous subjects: literature, American history, religion, and, uh, whatever the hell Daniel Smith is singing about. (Notably, Smith only became respectable within indie rock when he gave up the high-pitched, hyper-hypo vocals and weird lyrics of his Danielsen Famile albums for the lower-pitched simple mysteriosos of his solo album.)

Musically, the seven Athens musicians in Ice Cream Socialists fall firmly within this tradition; you hear toy piano and accordion, the drums sound like your kid brother practicing in the orchestra room, and the best adjective overall is "jaunty." But while the songs on the debut album Belles & Missiles are lean, mean and inventive, the lyrics are about cats, birds, school and robots. We're back in K waters, minus twee's redeeming quality: sexuality. And okay, they quote both Pachelbel's "Canon" and "Chopsticks," and that's both musical and embarrassing.

But, ICS rocks that Canon out, and it's saying something that on an album with an average track time of about two minutes, you still lose your way. The band has a real knack for structure, inventive but not proggy, throwing bits of songs and interludes together in a way that flows but doesn't repeat. Unfortunately, this talent doesn't necessarily extend to arrangements, and the flow here stems in part from a monotonous tone.

They're best when broken down, as in the beginning of "Bird'z Tale" (birds) and the end of "Zagnut's Revenge" (robots?). But the standout track is also the longest: "Day of the Danny," which comes in at 3:43 and starts with extremely cringey lyrics ("kiss the girls by the water fountain," iee!) but only gets better, with a quiet, metrically interesting pre-chorus that slides into a chant of "We will become / astronauts when we're older / we will become / human fireflies," then a faster part and another verse and Stephanie Davis' violin break, and then back into a bunch of repetitions of the chant/ chorus. That's one of the few times on the album the Ice Cream Socialists let a section ride a cappella until interrupted by an absolutely awesome drum/ bass hit from Payton Bradford and Brantley Jones, and then a rocking coda. It all fits together way better than it should, and is remarkably effective; it makes the lyrics work.

In context, Ice Cream Socialists may be slightly dangerous, but in the abstract, these guys are worth a listen.

Michael Barthel Ice Cream Socialists are playing a CD release show upstairs at Tasty World on Friday, Sept. 8.