Music Box | Le Loup

Mike Newmark Columnist

Le Loup
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Assembly
[Hardly Art]

Even as the Internet has allowed us to download music in its most elemental sound-file form, it’s amazing how reliant we still are on peripheral information to judge it. The first time I looked at Le Loup’s debut, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, I rolled my eyes. Here’s another upstart band with an animal in its name (“Le Loup” is French for “The Wolf”), that plays rural music (folk) out of an urban city (Washington, D.C.). There are five exclamation points just in the track list; the lyrics booklet has over 50. The sheer length of the album title—taken from an altar at the Smithsonian American Art Museum—smacks of pomposity. And the pre-release buzz surrounding Throne was humongous, precipitated by bloggers and cooler-than-thou journalists who compared Le Loup to The Arcade Fire without batting an eye. For skeptical me, the deck was stacked against Le Loup before they’d even played a note.

I mention all of this to emphasize how misleading such information can be, for the music on Throne is a much more elusive creature. Like many indie bands carrying the “folk” tag, Le Loup is folky in the very loosest sense, defined only by the presence of a banjo. And that banjo—played by principle performer, singer and songwriter Sam Simkoff—isn’t earthy or comforting as is usually the case; it’s stark, standoffish and cold. The same can be said for Simkoff’s voice, an oddly repellant tenor that feels like a frigid wind against your skin. Together, the vocals and the banjo ring out across an urban wasteland that’s littered with debris and stripped of most human life, yet poised for a possible regeneration.

And that’s the strange thing about Throne: It’s an apocalyptic album that’s dissatisfied with its own woebegone state. In fact, I’ve never heard an album try so hard to be positive while sounding so negative. Simkoff favors ascending scales like those that lead off “To the Stars! To the Night!”, but they’re usually too dry to raise anyone’s spirits, and even with the dance-inspired beat on “Outside of This Car, The End of the World!” and the handclaps on “We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!”, Throne still feels oppressive. That wouldn’t be such a detriment if Le Loup had conjured half the brooding atmosphere of their spiritual brethren Grizzly Bear and Califone, but musically, Throne offers only a curious hollowness—the result of downer acoustic instrumentation and 8-bit electronics that never quite jell.

It took me a few listens—and some poking around the liner notes—to realize that Throne is, above all, a singer-songwriter record. The lyrics are uniformly more rapturous than the music, speaking of kingdoms and colors and storms and heaven, and one wishes that Simkoff’s words were provided a lusher melodic outlet.

Magic does happen once in a while: For the first minute of “Planes Like Vultures,” Simkoff harmonizes with himself over no music whatsoever, whisper-singing “All too soon, we’ve come to bloom / And blown about in dusty ribbons / And pointed skyward, scrape the heavens / And should we end before we’re shriveled / Then call the names that we’ve been given.” It’s a singularly beautiful moment, suggesting death and rebirth through remembrance.

Most times though, as on “Le Loup (Fear Not),” Simkoff jettisons this restraint for hokey histrionics that complement his florid poetry too well. “Through the darkness, through the night! / Oh you thoughtless howling host! / Oh you ghost-white grieving wolves!” sung in a jumpy faux-vibrato isn’t cool no matter how many times you brave it.

Throne can be a difficult album to swallow and harder to pin down; after the first dozen spins, I wasn’t even sure what to call it (car-wreck country? Nintendo folk?). It took me even longer to figure out that I didn’t like it, but Le Loup just doesn’t have the allure of other experimental folk acts like The Skygreen Leopards, Bird Show, or even Ill Lit. Throne is not sweet, not soothing, not powerful, not challenging, not emotional; it’s not really much of anything. Moreover, it fails to hit me in any of the three key places that good music does: the brain, the body or the heart. The result is a record that—considering how unique and poetic it can be—doesn’t succeed in justifying its own existence.