If Dan Snaith has mastered one aspect of his music career, it's change. Not the remodeling or renovation sort, more the alterations and adaptations with purpose. The steady upward progression in replayability between 2001's glitchy Start Breaking My Heart and 2005's towering Milk of Human Kindness feels like a problem of some sort was solved. Which makes room for the comparative left-turn of Andorra, which both felt like a huge surprise (songs!) and a logical extension (songs with insane drumming!) of what he'd always been doing.

I'll admit that when I first saw the title "Odessa", I feared the worst-- stasis. The song's title, and Snaith's evident propensity for British chamber pop, immediately made me prepare for an album inspired by the Bee Gees' 1969 conceptual lark. My trepidation was quickly alleviated when I played the track and, soothingly enough, couldn't figure out what the hell I was listening to. As usual, Snaith filters his influences through his own chilly-and-warm aesthetic, which one of my friends once said was a perfect soundtrack for sun melting snow.

Appropriately, Odessa's main reference point is the icy geek disco of Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Erlend Øye (I seriously did a double-take when the vocals came in). Snaith tricks out the sound with ESG-style sound bombs, a little chicken-scratch guitar, clanging polyrhythms playing off a globular bassline, and eventually, a piano cribbed from an early-90s house track that feels right at home. Snaith works with restraint, riding the beat for all its worth and keeping his affect more or less in check. Given "Odessa"s awesomeness, and its clear break from its predecessors, here's hoping that Snaith is good enough to us to retain at least one trend from Andorra on the forthcoming Swim: a variety of repetitions on this well-chosen theme.