Conjuring both Mick Jagger and David Bowie, Fleming swaggers and shimmies on stage. He strikes playfully defiant poses, hands on hips, while his face does its own dance, with wildly exaggerated expressions: raised brows, eyes wide open, mouth enunciating every word. Not bad for someone known primarily as the drummer in Foxygen.

For the first half of this Tiny Desk performance, Fleming remained relatively restrained behind the mic, strumming an acoustic guitar. The band opened with “Spring Breathes,” a sprawling showpiece with so many change-ups it feels like an entire album’s worth of music, followed by the melancholy and soulful “Not That Easy.” Both cuts are from Diane Coffee’s sophomore full-length, Everybody’s A Good Dog.

But for the second half of the set, Fleming put down the guitar and let himself off the leash, gyrating and wildly gesturing to the crowd as he belted out the words to “Mayflower.” By the end of the song, Fleming was winded, panting and gulping water, trying to catch his breath before closing with the girl group-inspired “Green,” from Diane Coffee’s 2013 debut, My Friend Fish. In the end, Fleming and the rest of Diane Coffee had left it all on the Tiny Desk floor — in as much as anyone can when performing for a roomful of people working at computers.

Everybody’s a Good Dog is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon)

Set List

• “Spring Breathes”
• “Not That Easy”
• “Mayflower”
• “Green”

Credits

Producers: Robin Hilton, Morgan Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Morgan Walker, Colin Marshall, Julia Reihs; Production Assistant: Kate Drozynski; Photo by Jun Tsuboike/NPR

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Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Aspiring to a ’70s ideal that rolls up sugarcoated bubblegum glam, soul balladry, Francophone pop and echoes of the Brill Building, Fleming finds the right notes of sincerity under all that artifice. “Spring Breathes” inhales the dark perfume of Pet Sounds and exhales something akin to truthful camp, as the track bounces between his breaking falsetto and acoustic strum, and between choral bursts of fuzz guitar and chunky bass. “Soon To Be, Won’t To Be” continues those clever juxtapositions, coming across like a millennial Saint Etienne with its mutable, Leslie-speaker vocal vibrato and rainy-day stabs of funk organ. The rhythm section anchors the album from stem to stern, its low end acting as a buffer against studio-tested fills, brassy bravado and canny intros that make these 11 songs feel all the more familiar.

At the center of all this is Fleming, who mines a double-edged conceit: tailoring the intensely borrowed elements of Everybody’s A Good Dog to fit his own aims, and bringing his stage and screen training along to bolster them. He’s mugging as hard as he can, while also adding dimension and character to the collection. His cooing high notes are matched by a predilection for blue-eyed soul, with a range that accommodates jumps into the clouds and throaty, from-the-gut proclamations. “Duet,” a fittingly named collaboration with vocalist Felicia Douglass, recalls the weathered 45 sides that built up R&B radio in the early ’70s; the song jams a bedroom-funk wah-wah break into a confident take-me-back ballad, underlining the influences while also having fun with them. Fleming will never let you forget where his music comes from, but on Everybody’s A Good Dog, he works hard to keep his own identity in there, as well.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.