Kevin Bronson on August 13th, 2013

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If the Troubadour weren’t so crowded on Friday night, it’d have been the perfect place for a makeout party. On second thought, maybe it was, if you didn’t mind public displays of affection. The lights were low and mostly blue … the mood was bedroom-intimate … and L.A. quartet Superhumanoids certainly provided an appropriate soundtrack.

Plus, the quartet’s debut album is, after all, called “Exhibitionists.” After a seemingly agonizing gestation period, the album came out earlier this month via Innovative Leisure. On the upside, it’s a collection of electronically forested dream-pop centered around Sarah Chernoff’s yearning vocals. On the downside, “Exhibitionists” is absent two of the quartet’s best songs, “Mikelah” and “Malta,” from earlier EP or single releases. To cop the (possibly ironic) title of Superhumanoids’ 2010 EP, their inclusion would have given the album more “Urgency.”

There was little urgency Friday night as well. Rather than engage the sold-out room in conversation, Chernoff and gang were content to background it, as if a movie scene were being filmed and the romantically conflicted protagonists were at a crossroads that fit the song “So Strange.” As with the album, the singles “Geri” and set-ender “Too Young for Love” stood out, their swelling choruses cascading over the room. Their cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs” was a nice exercise, but only that, and the show ended abruptly, an album-release “celebration” with no encore.

That Superhumanoids chose to keep their distance prevented the evening from being a truly visceral experience; instead, it was more like their meticulously produced and arranged album, a thoughtful one. Perhaps even overthought.

Indie-rockers Vanaprasta, two years removed from their regrettably overlooked debut “Healthy Geometry,” opened, playing their first show in about six months. They displayed a handful of new songs and new takes on old ones – all of which seemed more Twin Shadow than their twin-guitar-assault of old.