The party on stage — complete with dancing, head bobbing, and occasional mid-song laughter — was only mildly contagious for the small crowd that stayed long enough to hear White Rabbits Sunday night at The House. Maybe the audience could tell that, dancing drummers and all, White Rabbits band had seen better days.

Two local bands opened the show: The Tall Grass Captains of Greater Chicago and Astral Guard, who rocked hard with original “psychedelic revivalist music,” as bassist and NIU general studies major Jacob Miguel called it.

A band of DeKalb High School alumni, Astral Guard brought in the most people. But by the time White Rabbits graced the stage, the crowd had dwindled to half its previous size, this despite White Rabbit’s recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

There were many points during White Rabbits’ brief set at The House Café Sunday night during which half of the six-piece band was playing drums. In addition to two full-time drummers, other band members would periodically trade in their own axes for a set of maracas, a tambourine or a floor tom.

In White Rabbits’ rhythm-dominated sound world, sometimes even guitars and vocals sound like percussion instruments.

A fresh-faced bunch of college friends who moved from Columbia, Mo. to New York City on a whim, White Rabbits live off of youthful enthusiasm and an appealing dose of naïveté. The band lives in a loft in Brooklyn where they all the sleep in the same tiny bedroom, like a cabin at summer camp.

After a couple years in the New York rock scene, White Rabbits landed an indie record deal and are now relentlessly touring to promote their debut album, “Fort Nightly.”

“I know it sounds hokey, but we really love doing this,” keyboard player and vocalist Stephen Patterson said. “Playing live is my favorite part of being a musician.”

This having been said, White Rabbits let the DeKalb doldrums get to them Sunday night. By the time the three opening bands finished and White Rabbits took the stage, only half an hour remained before The House Café’s closing time, and most of the younger fans who had come to see local favorites Astral Guard were long gone, opting instead for a rumored after-show keg party.

Dressed in sport jackets and patented leather shoes, the palpably disappointed White Rabbits started the set with “Kid on my Shoulders,” an aggressively dissonant sing-along carried by the piano’s low end-rumbles and non-stop maracas.

“The Plot,” a somewhat one-dimensional Clash-derived pop song on record, had surprising electricity in performance.

Somewhere in the middle of the set White Rabbits offered “Sea of Rum” as a case study of the band’s singular aesthetic: Interlocking African rhythms played on drum rims gave way to optimistic chord progressions and soaring vocals that eerily evoked a nursery rhyme or old American folk song.

Before their final song lead singer and guitarist Gregory Roberts sarcastically announced, “This is it. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for: Another song by a band you’ve never heard.” Once the song was over, the band quickly retreated from the stage, ignoring the two or three people demanding an encore.

Traveling with White Rabbits for this leg of the tour was the NYC-based Via Audio, whose own brand of dance rock is informed not by the ska and Afro-beat of White Rabbits but by the futuristic electronics of Aphex Twin and The Postal Service.

Their songs revealed a refreshing attentiveness to dynamics and melody, rarities in modern indie rock.

“I think the biggest affect of us being on Letterman is everyone asking us what the biggest affect of us being on Letterman is,” said White Rabbits guitarist

Alex Even, who described Sunday night as “kind of a bleak show.”

Preparing to record a new album in January, White Rabbits have stores of energy to keep things going.

On their final song “I Used to Complain, Now I Don’t,” lead singer Gregory Roberts sang “Come on, it’s not that bad.” It sounded like he was singing it to his band mates as much as to the audience.