Metavari are an instrumental post-rock trio from Fort Wayne, Ind. When I saw they were playing at Beaver Falls Coffee & Tea Co., I was concerned. Potentially loud rock with no vocals goes against the “lonely Nick Drake afficienado with acoustic guitar” norm that seems to populate a lot of coffee houses, but this really had the potential to work. And it did, in spades.

The three guys from Metavari — Andrew McComas on drums and guitar, Ty Brenneman on bass and Nate Utesch on keyboard — crammed as much as they could into the main seating area in BFC&T, allowing enough room for the crowd to move around a little between songs. They set their projector on top of the shop’s upright piano, made a few jokes about how much the house-turned-coffee shop was like playing in a friend’s living room and proceeded to plow through almost a dozen songs.

McComas worked all of the samples through a laptop he had set up by his kit and the band used headphones to keep everything in synch with a metronome. This wasn’t because of incompetence, either: all of Metavari’s songs are meshed to the beat of the films they were projecting against the wall. In a way, it hearkened back to the orchestral music that accompanied film during the silent era. The band lock-stepped with archival footage of locomotives and carnivals, spilling out sampled drum loops with gorgeous black and white imagery.

In addition to a few songs from last year’s Ambling EP, the band played the bulk of their forthcoming debut Be One Of Us and Hear No Noise. Opening with “Kings Die Like Other Men,” the guys trickled in after the found sound intro, snippets of dialogue replaced by Utesch’s drizzling electric piano. After some initial technical problems, Brenneman’s distorted bass soon added punch to the next few songs.

I hate pigeonholing bands with comparisons, but I was reminded of Idaho’s last few more electronic albums, or El Ten Eleven or maybe a softer version of Unwed Sailor or some of Early Day Miners’s quieter moments. Still, whatever influences the guys claim, it’s not overly apparent in their music.

I feel like a lot of post-rock or ambient rock can meander so far that it becomes boring, but that didn’t happen at all during the show. Utesch’s keyboard melodies have melodic weight to them, and it’s balanced by the rhythm section. McComas was particularly deft on the drum kit, and he jumped on guitar in a few spots. There was something optimistic about it all without being fluffy, a lyrical command of their music that lets it speak for itself.

The setting worked perfectly well, too. BFC&T’s small performance space kept the crowd close to the band, to the point were everyone was chatting in the few lulls between songs. The band even joined some of the audience on the shop’s front lawn for a bonfire after the performance.

Metavari put on a great show, made a dozen or so new fans and proved that good music can find a home in any venue.