While packing up his band's tour van after playing Sunday night in Cholmondeley's, Experimental Dental School guitarist Jesse Hall weighed in on the night's performance. "That was pretty good for a Monday night show," he said. His bandmate, drummer Shoko Horikawa, quickly corrected him, but both of them could have been forgiven for forgetting what day it was. After all, the Portland, Ore.-based band kicked off its tour two weeks ago in Salt Lake City and arrived at Brandeis fresh from two back-to-back shows in Brooklyn.

At Sunday's gig, organized by Punk, Rock n' Roll Club, the noise-rock duo played to a group of about 30 head-bobbing guests and a couple of Chum's baristas flailing with their friends in the back.

With their rainbow-striped and glittery amps, the two were all the more friendly for having their heads in the clouds. Appearing without an opener, they had no trouble warming up the audience. Hall urged the crowd to cluster around the stage, high-fiving them when he was happy with the way a song had gone.

The pair opened with the playful, poppy "Argentine Pears," a track from their most recent album, Forest Field. The rest of their set consisted mostly of other tracks from 2009's Forest Field, including the spacey and chaotic "Royal Fantasy Snow," in which Hall riffs trippily while Horikawa contributes la-la vocals. The band has drawn comparisons to indie band Deerhoof for its noise-pop fusion and swirling sound.

While most of the songs have lyrics, they are more of an afterthought for the band; Hall related a time when he realized the band had unknowingly booked a set at a Christian college in Tennessee and then worried, "Do we have any songs that mention the devil?"

The band's quirky song titles like "Square Wave Cave" and "Cheap Wine River" match its offbeat sound, as throughout the show the band repeatedly shattered Horikawa's ethereal vocals with the crash of her cymbals or a pounding guitar chorus.

Horikawa and Hall have collaborated on four albums now, surviving the departure of a third member during the band's move to Portland from San Francisco two years ago. The downsizing led Horikawa, formerly the group's organist, to take up the drums instead. (Compliment her on her sound and she deadpans, "Thanks, I learned when I was 30.")

The band retreated to a home studio in their basement to create their fourth album, Forest Field. In keeping with their art for art's sake philosophy, XDS made Forest Field available for free on their Web site. The site, which Hall maintains himself, is full of pink fonts and oddball self-descriptions in what Hall describes as an attempt to eschew the one-format-fits-all mentality of MySpace.

The band's change of setting is invoked on Forest Field's first track, titled "Basement Fever." The band also filmed its first-ever music video, for "Royal Fantasy Snow," in its basement studio. Their unshakeable inward focus has resulted in near-perfect collaboration that was quite evident at Sunday night's show, which had the same intimacy and informality as a basement session attended by friends. At the show's end, Hall and Horikawa announced they were leaving to indulge in some delicious delivered Thai food.