Separating the art from the artifice is never easy, especially when it’s difficult to tell whether the artist in question cares to distinguish between the two at all. For 40 years the musician, writer, and artist Mayo Thompson has guided the Red Krayola through concept-art pranks and rock ‘n’ roll recombination. En route, the band has squeaked out psychedelic classics and post-punk inventiveness as often as weird-for-its-own-sake experiments and the straight-ahead stinker.

Hurting and helping Thompson along this path is his constantly changing backing band. Since teaming up with the independent Chicago imprint Drag City, his label since 1994, Thompson has worked with a rotating cast for the Red Krayola albums, from production whiz and Tortoise drummer John McEntire to intellectual multi-instrumentalists David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke. For the band’s latest, “Introduction,” Thompson is joined by McEntire, ex-Slovenly bassist Tom Watson, versatile jazz and rock bassist Noel Kupersmith, accordionist Charlie Abel, and Thompson’s Pasadena Art Center College of Design co-artist/musician/ faculty member Stephen Prina. This loose lineup passes through a melange of stylish genre collages.

This iteration of the Red Krayola is by far Thompson’s most technically adroit. The band lays down a smooth jazz triphop vibe in the instrumental “L.G.F.” that is as unruffled as a Texas housewife’s big hair – and just as impressive a feat of fussy engineering. Cool washes of Space Age keyboard exhales dance over a Steely Dan beat like a water bug barely rippling a pond’s surface.A smug cascade of trebly guitar notes swirls through this airy mix, and bass notes bubble to the fore and pop away in a mist. The whole thing would be deliciously high-concept comedy if the band let anybody else in on the joke.

While the modern Krayola has skill and style to spare, it lacks the casual, loose amateurishness that animated Krayola’s music from the late 1960s, as well as its collaborations with the Art and Language collective during the 1970s and ’80s. Thompson’s vision welcomes a slight sloppiness, and McEntire, Kupersmith, et al. are musicians who can nail any complex structure or obtuse meter.

Thompson has found a way to weld his ramshackle, offbeat humor to such rigidity: Simple guitar songs become ornate melodies with jittery meters while sardonic vocal affectations morph into academic seriousness, and talking blues numbers divert into witty asides. Part of it works, part of it doesn’t, and yet the whole album feels better than the sum of its wonky parts.

On “A Tale of Two,” McEntire’s drums maintain a spacious rock pound as Thompson’s guitar and Kupersmith’s bass wobble around as if played by guys drunk on different spirits, each obstreperous but with dissimilar temperaments. Through this Thompson’s brittle falsetto meanders, recounting a woozy tale about a lonesome, and possibly quasi-existential, pole cat. Even better, on “Psy Ops” a driving, postpunk fuzz is coupled with a childlike singsong melody of Thompson’s surrealistic poetry. “I go somewhere where cigarettes are food” he sings, as if it were a lover’s entreat.

For every such agitated spark, though, there’s a question mark. “Puff” is a noisy, melodramatic extrapolation of the children’s tune “Puff the Magic Dragon” that doesn’t offer any musical or lyrical reason for the allusion. Odder still is the woodsy dirge “Bling Bling,” a song whose sole purpose seems to be a foil to its title.

What makes the Red Krayola more than a mere smarty-pants wiseacre is Thompson’s ability to combine inventiveness with irony. An indelible Red Krayola moment comes four songs into “Introduction.” “Note to Selves” starts off with a wistfully melancholic intro before Thompson sings/murmurs the verses in an artificially low voice, as if he were Billy Joel trying to do Scott Walker. Two minutes and 50 seconds into a song with but 46 seconds left to go, and it still sounds like the kind of breezy yacht rock more typical of Leo Sayer than one of the more slyly intellectual underground musical chimeras.

Every recent Krayola album has one of these curve balls, a song that makes fans wonder if artful dodger Thompson has finally lost his mind completely and passed from mannered appropriation into sincerely superficial hogwash. And then a twist of sanity comes – here, a cavalcade of layered voices, each background singer chiming in with a deadpan chorus of “bop.” These repeated phrases, the simplest in the rock songbook alongside “yeah,” swirl into an intoxicating morass. It’s practically a throwaway moment, less than a minute long, but it’s comfortably eccentric enough to hint that Thompson still has a few surprises up his sleeve.