Kevin Bronson on May 18th, 2015

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Lightning and thunder and rain filled the skies outside the Troubadour on Thursday night, but inside the mood was all celebratory: Fool’s Gold, playing behind its new album “Flying Lessons.”

||| Photos by Zane Roessell

The album — the band’s third and first in almost four years — finds their polyglot pop at its sharpest and sweetest. By all appearances, Thursday night should have been one of those sweaty, sold-out dance parties that Fool’s Gold hosted back in the early days, when there were 12 people in the band. And although there was room to move in the West Hollywood room, the band (now numbering four, with keyboardist Brad Caulkins’ departure earlier this year) gave a performance that lacked nothing in energy, effervescence or craft, even in its newly stripped-down form.

Fool’s Gold’ global palette of African rhythms and Western pop showed its true colors early; they eased into their set with the jammy “Poseidon,” off their 2009 debut, and followed with “Tel Aviv” from 2011’s “Leave No Trace” before singer/bassist Luke Top crooned his way through the new song “Ta’alumah.” It’s a song with Hebrew lyrics about his father’s emigration to the U.S. from Israel, and its deeply emotional tenor is reminiscent of the band’s first album.

The quartet hit their stride, though, with “Surprise Hotel,” which found drummer Garrett Ray and percussionist Salvador Placencia laying down a thicket of rhythms while guitarist Lewis Pesacov dazzled with his piercing, pointillist licks. “We’ve been playing that song for almost eight years,” Pesacov said afterward, beaming, and leaving unsaid the sentiment shared by the crowd: It hasn’t gotten old.

With the bar set high, the foursome cruised through new songs “Flying Lessons” and “Another Sun” before dipping back into album No. 2 for the “The Dive.” They followed with new single “I’m in Love,” a sparkling, croon-alicious dance song that’s probably the most immediately infectious song Fool’s Gold has ever made, if the crowd’s voracious clap-along was any indication. After concluding the main set with 2011’s “Street Clothes” and its rallying cry “There’s no holding back,” Placencia hyped the crowd for the the encore, new songs “Break the Cycle” and “Wildflower.”

Given the strength of “Flying Lessons,” it’d be a shame if fans didn’t come back around to the band originally founded by Top and Pesacov some eight years ago, when Top once joked about being on the vanguard of the “Afro-Hebrew-soul-dance-pop trend.” But as Top sings on the new album’s “Lady of the Lake” (regrettably absent from Thursday’s set), “Hope will find a way / to awaken something.”

The Happy Hollows preceded Fool’s Gold with a set of music from their forthcoming third album, which was produced by Pesacov. With frontwoman Sarah Negahdari exuding her typically outsized charm and, occasionally, her eye-popping guitar skills, the four-piece revealed new tunes as reliant on propulsive, agitated rhythms and synths as their previous songs were on merely guitar and bass.

Line & Circle, another band who have worked in the studio with Pesacov, opened with the night with some arena-sized alt-rock — think R.E.M. meets U2. The quintet has a full-length completed, but no release plans have been announced.