I love a mystery, don't you? Kindercore Records is counting on our collective mystery-love to fuel sales of The Frosted Ambassador. Who is the Ambassador? Why is he Frosted? Was this album really found on a beige cassette stuck in the toe of a resale shop shoe? Probably not, but it certainly explains all those Warner Brothers and A&M interns we've seen rummaging through the shoes at the Salvation Army shop lately. Music-wise, The Frosted Ambassador yields twelve tracks of quirky, instrumentally diverse pop psychedelia that teeters constantly on the edge of toyroom chaos -- the sort of disc you'd want to examine closely for Elephant 6 logos and familiar names, though neither of these clues are present. To sustain the delightful aura of mystery, none of the songs are named; you, the listener, are provided with blank lines on which to fill in your own, no doubt deeply personal, song titles. While clever, this makes it rather difficult to discuss the individual songs without calling them "track 5" or "the eleventh one", so when I tell you how much I enjoyed the lighthearted ukelele melody on "The King of the Toads Drives an Orange Toyota", or how I couldn't help but tap my feet to the ramshackle jangly bliss of "Shaving the Ocelot (on Wednesday)", I trust you'll appreciate the fact that my willful act of obfuscation is performed entirely in the spirit of the album. The Frosted Ambassador's other major strength is that it never wallows in its musical conceits; despite alternating between somber senility and funhouse frivolity, these twelve songs do their business and move along rather than settling down for 14-minute jam camp-outs. They may be mysterious, but they don't take undue advantage of their listeners.