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Setting aside the drums to get in the 'Swim'

What separates Canadian expat Dan Snaith from thousands of hazy texture-etchers operating under the indie-rock umbrella is drums, drums, drums. Big drums, little drums, live drums, processed drums, Chinese drums, kettle drums.

What separates Canadian expat Dan Snaith from thousands of hazy texture-etchers operating under the indie-rock umbrella is drums, drums, drums. Big drums, little drums, live drums, processed drums, Chinese drums, kettle drums.

What his early albums as first Manitoba and then Caribou lacked in songful cohesion they made up for in bursting, cymbal-splashing codas that turned even the most pastoral sequence into a war-dance epic. And yet his finest record yet, 2010's brooding Swim, has less bish-bashing than any of them; lines repeat and hypnotize rather than cresting and pounding down.

This made for a fascinating proposition live: What, if anything, is an indie-rocker to do on stage with a song like "Sun," a basic dance track whose entire lyric chants "sun, sun, sun" over a twisting nighttime drive beat?

The crowd at the First Unitarian Church on Sunday night didn't know what to do either. Moshers crashed into each other during "Melody Day," gazed at their feet when a swell of feedback engulfed "Kaili," and exploded into dancing for - what else - "Sun."

Snaith himself hardly sat diddling with a laptop. He high-fived the front row the moment he walked on, sang facing the side so his tambourine-shaking shadow would move against his psychedelic-projected light show, rocked the guitar some, and banged on a tiny, broken drumkit opposite his actual drummer.

With two percussionists, the programmed synthetics of Swim gained volume and loads more dynamics. The show peaked in the middle with "Bowls" (which, amazingly, reprised its carefully arrhythmic Tibetan singing bowls), and the unstoppable new single "Odessa," which Snaith adorned with a recorder solo and outsourced the chorus to his bass player.

Even the looser old stuff like 2003's "Skunks" gained volume with a backbeat as sturdy as Greek columns before dissolving into static worthy of My Bloody Valentine. Variety and band dynamics - not bad for a pastoral-textural laptop artist and studio obsessive.