If Pink Floyd hadn’t insisted on applying the phrase “the delicate sound of thunder” to their own music when they came up with it, they could have loaned it out to Los Angeles sextet RACES. On “Big Broom,” RACES more than live up to the description by mixing rafter-shaking atmospheric rumbling with ethereal wispiness like a thunderstorm raging in Fairyland.

The song kicks off with a brooding bass line and sketchy guitar part that for the first section of “Big Broom” places it in the dark psychedelic territory of bands like The Black Angels and The Warlocks. Then pianist Breanna Wood drops in to add a soaring harmony to Wade Ryff’s lead vocals and it’s like a ray of sunlight suddenly cutting through the dark clouds. The ominous roar of the song continues on its way, but Wood’s voice slowly moves more and more to the fore until by the end she’s on equal footing with Ryff and “Big Broom” concludes with the feeling that the clouds have parted for good.

Crafting a song that simultaneously stomps and tiptoes requires a band with a sure sense of dynamics, and Races rise to that challenge with “Big Broom.” They sacrifice neither roar nor soar, but strike a perfect balance between the two. “Big Broom” is like a storm that batters everyone below it with hailstones, then paints the sky with a rainbow to make up for it.

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Vanish Valley “Races”

Color of Clouds “Brother”

There must be something about the Scandinavian landscape, something expansive and limitless, that can’t help but seep its way into those nations’ musical exports. Readers have previously witnessed this quality on tracks by Blindfold, Seabear, Rubik, and Pallers, and today it’s dished out by Finnish act Delay Trees.

The quartet’s self-titled full-length debut was released earlier this month by Friendly Fire Recordings (home to Oh No Ono, The Concretes, and Acrylics) and showcases a dream-pop sound notable not so much for the genre’s typical hazy atmospherics but instead for crisp production with significant crossover potential.

“Cassette 2012,” the album’s second cut, is engaged in a romantic affair with the end of the world. Vocalist Rami Vierula sings with clarity and poise, letting a faint accent feather the edges of lyrics like, “I’ll meet you in 2012 on the stairs where we first met / And I’ll bring you a cassette we can listen to when all ends, softly.”

These sentiments are reinforced by Vierula’s bandmates, who concoct a spacious sonic canvas. Guitar notes chime out with pristine integrity and the rhythm section conspires to create a flow that has strength but is never forceful. Taken together, it is a gorgeous bit of performance as evocative as it is striking.

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PS I Love You “2012″

I don’t smoke, but after listening to “Yer Spring” I feel like I need a cigarette.

The opening track from Newfoundland, Canada six-piece Hey Rosetta!‘s new LP, Seeds, is the kind of song that takes a lot out of a listener, an epic in miniature whose intensity escalates to greater and greater levels like a fireworks display ramping up to the finale. Bandleader Tim Baker has said “this is a song about that looking for a spring, in every sense of the word: a rebirth, a propulsion, a source of power and nourishment,” and as hyperbolic an artistic statement as that may sound, it pretty much hits the mark.

Bubbling forth from a gentle spring of atmospheric guitars and bass, “Yer Spring” is set in motion by an insistent kick drum and Baker’s soft vocals (which have something of Chris Martin around the edges of their high notes). Things build quickly from there, reaching loftier new plateaus before charging forth to the next elevation. Eventually, around the 3:18 mark, this leads to one of the sweetest payoffs in recent memory, a satisfying, climactic surge that finds Hey Rosetta! rocketing upward on their own momentum.

Although Hey Rosetta! have enjoyed some acclaim in their native Canada, they have yet to significantly break through to audiences in other countries. They clearly have the talent to do so, however, and here is hoping that tracks like “Yer Spring” will be just the thing to make it happen.

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Andy Clockwise “Stealing Cars (Second Wind)”

Oh No Ono “Internet Warrior”

Hot Club de Paris “Free the Pterodactyl 3″

When a delicately pretty pop song opens with the lines “I am not so innocent, you realized / When I cut your head off your body,” the listener would normally suspect that there must be some metaphorical meaning at work. That would be an incorrect assumption in the case of “Showers Without Warning,” a track by Los Angeles’ Hi Ho Silver Oh. The band has recorded an entire suite of songs as their alter-egos, Happy Campers in 3D, inspired by the Friday the 13th film franchise, so all the bloodbath imagery of “Showers Without Warning” is intended literally, no matter how prettily it’s performed.

And it is performed very prettily indeed, full of lush harmonies and soaring “ohs” and “ahs” and Casey Trela’s deceptive choirboy vocals gliding atop a bed of shiny pop hooks. Musically it might best be described as a cross between Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire, mixing the Foxes’ delicate folk-rock harmonies with the Arcade Fire’s facility with soaring pop constructions. The sweetness of the presentation makes the contents of the lyrics feel that much more subversive.

Lyrically, “Showers Without Warning” is all beheadings and severed arteries and spurting blood. The action takes place, of course, in a shower – ever since Psycho the main rule of slasher films has been “get naked, get dead” and the rules still apply in Hi Ho Silver Oh’s songs. The main difference is that in the movies, the bloodletting was never set to soaring pop bliss.

It says something about the oddity of today’s pop music scene that the main thing that will keep “Showers Without Warning” off the radio is not the subject matter but the presentation – radio doesn’t have much use for sublime pop made by actual humans anymore. Radio probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with the slicing and dicing of they lyrics. In today’s musical world, setting those lyrics to sweet pop music is the most transgressive thing Hi Ho Silver Oh accomplish.

“Showers Without Warning” comes from the two-song 7″ record of the same name released this past January by Trailer Fire Records.

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The Dogs “A Decent Warning”

The 10 Best Songs of 2011 (So Far)

Grand Archives “Silver Among the Gold”