Join Us

After a pair of '80s albums that still sound startlingly fresh in the way they marry the dadaist impulses of Captain Beefheart and The Residents with an unexpected mastery of the pop hook, it briefly seemed like They Might Be Giants might make the leap from college radio to the wider world. But although John Flansburgh and John Linnell's early '90s albums emphasized the catchy tunes while tempering the experimental impulses, they were simply out of step with the concurrent rise of the grunge era. Settling into a perhaps too-comfortable role as "geeky cult band," they made an increasingly infrequent string of disappointingly conventional pop records; late-career reinventions as children's music performers and TV scorers made it seem like their moment was truly past. Which is the long way of explaining what a delightful surprise it is that Join Us is TMBG's first genuinely good album since 1994's underrated John Henry. In terms of both sound and songwriting, it's closest in spirit to Flood and Apollo 18, the records that best balanced the oddball minimalism of the self-titled debut and its follow-up Lincoln and the XTC-like guitar pop that came later. The inventive tunes show a creativity and snap that's been lacking for quite some time, ranging from the outright surrealism of "Cloisonné" to the punky bile of "When Will You Die?" and the straightforward power pop of "Judy is Your Vietnam." At 18 tracks in 47 minutes, not everything works, but that was true even on their best albums.