Before you listen to The Gap, I must issue a warning: it's not recommended for use while driving. Why? Because Joan of Arc's third release includes the potentially alarming "Knife Fights Every Night". The song lives up to the promise of its title -- it's a recording of night sounds, including a cop's patrol car running its siren. If you listen to CDs in the car, as I do, you're going to think -- for one breathtaking moment -- that you're getting pulled over...as I did.

The Gap is full of jokes like that -- some musical and some lyrical, some more intellectual than others. If you've got an offbeat sense of humour, and/or you appreciate abstruse musical questions, you'll be thrilled to death by The Gap. The first track, "(You) [i] Can Not See (You) [Me] as (I) [You] Can" is a perpetual tease. It pulls you in with a bit of acoustic guitar and a posh melody in Tim Kinsella's muted voice, only to skip for at least a beat -- a deliberate reproduction of that annoying, chiming digital skipping sound, which continues throughout the song. This joke threw even my musical geek neighbour, who dropped by to tell me that "I think something's wrong with your copy".

"As Black Pants Make Cat Hairs Appear" initially focuses on what sounds like someone dropping a tray of silverware on the floor, then moves into the mingling harmonies, popping electronic sounds, occasionally crashing cymbals and meditative acoustic guitars of the song proper.

The lyrics here fit the tone of the music, offering further glimpses of off-kilter beauty, as in "As Black Pants Make Cat Hairs Appear" ("and then we all found work in factories during the war") and "Me and America" ("Be my patron saint/ sleep with me beside me"). The song titles may be the most esoteric thing about the album, and if you don't get them, you can just ignore them; they're largely for the band's amusement anyway, which may be The Gap's most notable flaw. Of course, if you really want to, you can watch John Cassavetes' films, follow Assata Shakur's exile and read Guy Debord's novels for long enough to finish the punchline. Whatever. Just put on your earphones, settle back in a quiet corner of your house -- or a library, or an art museum -- and listen... and dream about ways to answer all the questions that Joan of Arc provokes.