It's possible that Oh No! Oh My! is a perfect band for Brandeis: Despite its current hipness, the Austin band lives for cute gestures and audiences' sprightly responses. The mellifluous quintet's reference points are profound and eclectic-the lo-fi pyschedelia of Elephant 6 bands, twee acts like The Field Mice, standard '90s indie fare like Built to Spill-but they eschew pretense. Oh No! Oh My! plays fun, giddy music, songs about teenage trysts and Audrey Hepburn, and they do it with neither seriousness nor excessive frivolity. And the band's sound, it turned out Sunday night at Cholmondeley's, works live far better than on its self-titled debut. The show, staged by the Punk, Rock 'n' Roll Club, was a joyous exercise, largely due to the band's embrace of the small yet animated crowd where other bands might have performed at half steam. In "I Love You All the Time," the band dropped the studio version's tempo changes in favor a more charging rendition, and the audience responded in kind by dancing fanatically.

In the studio Oh No! Oh My! treats its songs like confections, gingerly ornamenting singer Greg Barkley's saccharine musings with fanciful arrangements, like dipping an apple in caramel. The band-a mere trio in the studio-was precise throughout Sunday's show, but messier and more ebullient than on its recordings. In "Lisa, Make Love! (It's Okay!)," instrumental breaks-bursts of analog synthesizers, acoustic pluckings and brushed percussion-soared over the song's character sketches, rather than simply breezing between them. And in "Skip the Foreplay," arena rock-style credenzas broke up the verses, displaying a showmanship hardly implied by the band's twee studio work.

It was such flourishes, coupled with a number of tighter, brand new songs, that suggested Oh No! Oh My! has larger aspirations: It'd rather be the next Weezer or Modest Mouse than be lumped with fellow blog favorites like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. (This is largely an economic comparison, anyway; both bands' self-released albums attained recognition almost solely through the Web.)

Even so, the young band mostly let loose Sunday, playing nearly its entire album, plus about six other songs. It was as fun for audience as for band-which only now seem comfortable with professional touring. The confidence in their reveries was illuminating: Sweetness, they could have screamed, need not be delicate.