Pop music is a creature that thrives on gimmicks and enigmas, and that bodes well for Sundog’s future outside the Crescent City.

He’s definitely NOLA’s greatest anonymous live looper with an astronaut suit and a ukulele, mixing Postal Service- and MGMT-style electro-indie with his own post-Sublime white-boy-soul, singer-songwriter mentality.

For those of you not in the know, a live looper is someone who performs over his own pre-recorded groove, making Sundog a one-man band—the kind of soulful troubadour who totes a pedal rather than a guitar.

While the combination of all these elements could result in real douchebag overload in the wrong hands, Sunddo leaves the quirkiness with the accouterments; he’s got a real way with a hook.

More exciting, he uses them in service of a personality that’s slick yet introspective, which is where the enigmatic part comes in; his fidgety geek romanticism usually comes across in one or two trance-inducing phrases, put on repeat for max effect. “Dead and Gone” finds him disappearing into his self-absorption for six minutes, but usually he knows better, indulging in a little bubblegum dnb into the mix on “The Prairie, the Fire, the Woman,” dropping a blues guitar over the lockstep of “Superstitions,” and indulging in some chipbeat-style samples on “Bristles.” (“Recorded in a broken-down spaceship,” reads the album’s liner notes).

Speaking of which, “Something Better” not only has a trumpet solo that marks it as a genuinely NOLA club anthem, but also as a possible national hit; it smokes most of the other PBR&B out there clogging up the charts, from Robin Thicke all the way up to Mayer Hawthorne. Like the rest of Space Criminal, it truly makes positivity sound sexy.

Watch out, Daft Punk. There’s a new helmet in town.