What a pleasant surprise. For too long, being a follower of They Might Be Giants required a healthy openness toward indulgence and mediocrity. John Flansburgh and John Linnell could be brilliant, indestructible pop miniaturists, but often they would flood albums with jokey, irritating doodles that tested casual fans' patience for whimsy and shtick.

Until now. After a few years of writing tv theme songs and releasing records on the internet, TMBG have returned with what is arguably their most consistently rewarding effort ever. (In other words, the songs are just as good the second time you play them.) Articulate, insightful, sweet-natured without being dopey, Mink Car bounces along from oddity to oddity. Diehards will recognize a few of these tunes from earlier Web albums and live shows, but the improvements made to "Older" and "She Thinks She's Edith Head" suggest that one of the secrets to Mink Car's success is that these 17 songs were worked over, thought out, and given time to develop.

In the past, They Might Be Giants represented the best (and certainly the worst) of literate, nerdy white-boy subculture. They made all the right hip references and possessed the right smarty-pants attitude, but they also suffered from chronic amounts of in-joke obscurity and emotional atrophy. Mink Car is the welcome compromise between the instinct to be smugly clever and to actually be a part of the human race; we'll see if they can stick to it Thursday at the Gypsy Tea Room.