Passion Pit shakes with 'Manners'

Boston-spawned electro-rockers Passion Pit are headed toward the beach. The band, whose members studied at Emerson College and Berklee College of Music, has wisely decided to handle a year of increasingly noisy hype by keeping things simple and focused on the music of its exuberant debut album, “Manners.’’

Thursday night at the Paradise the quintet was content to let its official CD release party be a show, not a coronation. Whether it was nerves or an aesthetic declaration, they eschewed gratuitous banter, fancy costumes, or padding the set with cover tunes. Instead there was only a gracious nod to reaching the storied nightclub stage, the relentless beat, the ecstatic sold-out audience, and the sense that dancing might just be a life-saving exercise. Or at least for the 45 minutes that Passion Pit was onstage.

The time flew by in a sweaty blur of bouncing bodies, stuttering keyboard riffs, and the impossibly consistent falsetto of frontman Michael Angelakos. Rocking his keyboard sideways, the bushy-haired vocalist was solid but never flamboyant as he soared into the stratosphere for “Sleepyhead,’’ sending the already amped-up crowd into a frenzy.

Songs like “Let Your Love Grow Tall’’ and “Little Secrets’’ boomed out of the PA with authority, the determined love children of Giorgio Moroder and Malcolm McLaren, half-mirror ball, half-glow stick, filled with video-game melodies and sinuous bass lines.

Brief but satisfying, the show was a positive bellwether for Passion Pit’s future.

Fellow buzz-bin denizens Harlem Shakes opened, arriving at an equally twitchy end result by very different means. In addition to some keyboard-based bounce, the band also dabbled in some global rhythms, cascading pop guitars, avant tempo changes, and adenoidal vocalizing. The whole thing added up to a pleasant evocation of bands as varied as Vampire Weekend and Squeeze.

Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com