The only thing even remotely offensive about Deerhoof [ tickets ]'s latest studio set, "Offend Maggie," might be the album's cover art. Created by Japanese surrealist Tomoo Gokita, the shirtless, faceless man portrayed in the image prompts an ooky shudder, a macabre dance of the mundane not unlike watching Michael Jackson walk around Disneyland with a face mask and surgical gloves.

Inside the sleeve, however, "Offend Maggie" is mostly more of the delightful same from the San Francisco Bay art-rockers, who turn up the heat ever so slightly over last year's "Friend Opportunity," partially owing to the debut of guitarist Ed Rodriguez; where the crew simmered slowly following the departure of bassist/guitarist Chris Cohen, the newly reconstituted foursome boils over in several places as the sublime Deerhoof twin-guitar attack regains some of its lost footing.

More of the same, of course, is something of a double-edged sword for the band, which began life more than a decade ago pumping out wildly careening one- and two-minute slices of pure pop schizophrenia, songs that more often than not finished in a completely different room than the one where they began. Frankly, the earlier model Deerhoof made records that sounded like several bands exploding/imploding all at the same time, in the same physical space, some of them capable of singing and playing musical instruments, some not.

Not so much of that going on here. "Offend Maggie" continues the band's departure from oddball left hooks into a more consistent and traditionally pop outlook, a move that will likely gain the group more new fans than it will lose by disappointing old ones.

And nothing here is really disappointing, anyway, so no need to fret over imagined losses. The album's opener, "The Tears and Music of Love," channels Free's "All Right Now" through an art-damaged filter, with singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki chasing down the '70s with her oddly compelling (and, as always, utterly unique) vocal tics. Past and present arrive at the finish line at approximately the same moment in time.

"Chandelier Searchlight," which follows next, is pretty enough to appear in Apple's next iPod commercial, and "Buck and Judy" opens with the precise sort of minor-key riffing that the band used to mulch into dissonance 30 seconds in just for the fun of it; the group plays it straight all the way through here, creating something that sounds, possibly ironically, kind of like a Blonde Redhead song. It's pretty.

The happy "Snoopy Waves" recalls older days right off the bat, and then inexplicably turns into a jazz/funk jam at the end. The title cut--which the band famously released as free downloadable sheet music months before the album's release--surprises absolutely no one by sounding nothing like any of the dozens of homebrew versions that fans uploaded to the Internet this summer.