For a decade now, John Linnell and John Flansburgh have been staking out their territory on the lunatic fringe of alternative rock, starting back when that was a description, not a genre. Calling themselves They Might Be Giants, after an early '70s goofball movie in which George C. Scott thinks he's Sherlock Holmes, Linnell and Flansburgh became a fixture on college radio with their cheery, upbeat pop nursery rhymes, toy instruments, nasal vocals, and convoluted lyrics like "every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of."

With Flansburgh on guitar and Linnell on keyboards, accordion, and horns, the Johns experiment with odd polyrhythms and samples while keeping the mix accessible, even childish-sounding. One fragmented song on 1992's "Apollo 18" took up 21 tracks on the CD. The duo still maintains a Dial-a-Song service in Brooklyn, an answering machine with whatever song they're working on as the outgoing message.

Linnell and Flansburgh have gotten back on track since 1994's bland "John Henry," They Might Be Giants' first full-length outing as a full band (you know, with bass and drums and lead guitar and stuff). Whereas "John Henry" was more of a straightforward rock album than the rest of TMBG's oeuvre (I always thought that meant "egg," but it doesn't), "Factory Showroom," the band's sixth album, represents a return to the weird.

"I want to raise my freak flag/higher and higher," Linnell and Flansburgh sing on "How Can I Sing Like a Girl?," a poppy anthem with a '50s sound much like the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" and an electric slide guitar solo straight out of "Blue Moon." "XTC vs. Adam Ant" imagines a knock-down, drag-out battle for the toppermost of the poppermost, and manages to sound a tiny bit like each of the combatants (though more the former), before moving to a chamber-music strings interlude that doesn't sound like anybody.

There's no track to compare with "Dinner Bell" (from "Apollo 18") or "Birdhouse in Your Soul" (from "Flood") to be found on "Factory Showroom" -- no song to play over and over until your friends bludgeon you to death. But it's not chock full of chaff, either. Among the better tunes is "S-E-X X-Y," a disco number with a wink and a smirk directed at the purple guy who doesn't have a name anymore (no, not Barney). "Exquisite Dead Guy," a weird, partially a cappella ditty with some minimal cello and bass accompaniment and a lot of ba-ba-da ba-ba-ba-da-ba's, stands out, as does "New York City," a peppy travel jingle describing the burg as an idyllic wonderland. And the humorously bombastic ballad "James K. Polk" sounds much more polished than it did on the 1990 "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" EP, especially with the addition of a haunting saw solo by Julian Koster and "Peggy Sue"-type galloping drums by Brian Doherty.

Though they have an honest-to-gosh rock band now, They Might Be Giants haven't entirely left their low-budget roots behind. "Your Own Worst Enemy" sounds like it was mostly played on a Casio, and "I Can Hear You" was cut on a circa-1898 Edison wax cylinder recording phonograph, without any electricity. The tinny sound is especially apropos because the song's about the incomprehensibility of intercoms, but it would be pretty keen regardless.

Flansburgh, the guitar-playing John, has a little something on the side, and that something is his band Mono Puff, whose album "Unsupervised" was released a few months ago. The result of a lot of messing around with Skeleton Key's drummer Steve Calhoun and Hal Cragin (bass player for Iggy Pop), as well as anyone else who happened to stop by over a few days, "Unsupervised" moves from one style to another with TMBG's offbeat sensibility.

"Distant Antenna" is a funky little jam with the ever-aloof and sexy Romanian-born actress Elina Lowensohn (star of "Nadja" and a few Hal Hartley flicks) providing a voiceover. A bouncy ska/funk instrumental number called "Dr. Kildare" follows a (barely) subdued murmuring version of the Gary Glitter song "Hello Hello," which sounds like Nirvana at its most melancholy if it weren't for the hopped-up tribal drums reminiscent of Adam & the Ants.

The haunting "To Serve Mankind" is played on a Melotron, an early sampler from the late sixties that lets you play human voices like a ghostly organ (made all the more spooky by the fact that the voices' owners may be long dead for all we know). Yeah, I know you can do all that with samplers now, Mr. Spielberg Smartypants, but this is much more impressive. The album closes with the miniature ode "Nixon's the One," which in the fine spirit of TMBG tomfoolery proclaims, "When they look back and weigh/everything he's done/they will realize/Nixon's the one." So let it be with Mono Puff.

All this poking around with gizmos and controlled wackiness may be an odd way to cut an album (or two), but to Flansburgh and Linnell it's simple, really. As George C. Scott says in "They Might Be Giants," "[Don Quixote] thought every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But thinking that they might be... Well, all the best minds used to think the world was flat. But what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought what they might be, why, we'd still be out there in the tall grass with the apes."