When Dirty on Purpose sing to me on my headphones [$], they’re soft and warm like a favorite blanket. In person, at Chop Suey on Thursday, the band turns up rock just a little bit. On their recording, I think that there are five, but the girl and occasional trumpets seem to be missing from the stage. The four boys manage nicely, songs are still fuzzy and dreamy, but they’re a little more liberal with the letting the guitars loose. The room is full but not crowded. It’s almost like the depiction of rock shows that you see on film, with just enough people around to feel like a good turnout but not packed so tightly as to make finding your friends or making a quick trip to the bar a pushy challenge.

All of the dreamy layering vocals are still here, and I’m surprised to see that most of the lead singing duties are picked up by the drummer. At times, he’s singing, drumming, and shaking a tambourine, which somehow seems like more of a feat than the usual guitar/singing situation. As their set draws to a close, the band turns down the lights, makes use of the disco ball and takes the volume down a bit for a song that would be suitable for a middle school champagne snowball dance. For their last song, it’s fun with feedback time, leaving us with a harder impression of the usual gentle spacey feel and a crescendoing finale.

As the Album Leaf packs the stage to its capacity with tons of equipment, fans condense and jockey for a position with the best view. Sheets have been wrapped all around the back of the stage and all of the classic keyboards, a xylophone, a violin, and banks of knobs, buttons, and dials look old fashioned and fascinating. When everything is set-up, Jimmy LaVelle has surrounded himself with a cocoon of electric pianos and plenty of glowing controls. The lights drop and those white sheets are illuminated with constantly-changing live visualizations that run the course from color study lava lamps, to charts and maps, and a Moog tribute video thrown in for good measure.

As the band plays, fans engage in personal Name that Tune matches, shouting hoots of acknowledgment at the opening notes of favorite tracks. Eventually, the crowd segregates peacefully, but dramatically. One contingent maintains a tight cluster around the band while others filter to the back of the bar to add a din of continuous chatter to the background, leaving an eight foot chasm of empty space in between. And although I was among the attentive faction, it’s hard to fault the others for preferring to have the band’s relentlessly pretty and expansive songs serve as background music to their conversations.

This orchestral “post-rock” is, after all, the sort of thing that inspires enthusiastic rocking back and forth on one’s feet rather than a full-body commitment. Yet there are plenty of interesting things happening on stage. In addition to the projections, which provide appropriately hypnotic, there is the guy who insists on wearing heavy sunglasses at night. My favorite part, though, is they guy who plays the xylophone with a pair of violin bows. Although it’s not quite as cool as when Jonsi from Sigur Ros plays his guitar with a bow, the sound is nevertheless unique and haunting and I really get a kick out of learning little production tricks. Finally, because the band brought along their own light show, Chop Suey barely had a chance to give their seizure-inducing LED spotlights a workout.