Le Loup's Debut Album

Le Loup, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, (Hardly Art) seven out of ten starsThere’s an eerie beauty thread throughout Le Loup’s debut album, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly; it thrives in the unexpected meshing of folk twang and electronic twiddling, in arrangements as vast as a desert sky, in rushes of ghostly sound affects that send you to another place and in poetic, antiquated lyricism that makes you wonder whether singer/songwriter Sam Simkoff is looking at the world from its beginning or end.The dominant feel on The Throne is anachronistic—one senses it was made out of love for another time, for a time when nature dominated and filled the world with beautiful mystery and danger. Yet at the same time—among the mechanized feel of subtle synthesizer and drum machine—Simkoff acknowledges a modern and unpleasant detachment from nature that time has created. Quiet future-facing doom is buried within each song, leaving the listener filled with a longing for what was and a dread for what is. “It’s the end! / It’s the end! / It’s the end!” Simkoff cries with multiple intentions on the album’s closer “I Had A Dream I Died”. Shortly after his dark proclamations dissipate into the distance, the sweet sounds of twittering birds begin—it is just this sort of dichotomy, this regret and optimism, that lets the album feel raw and honest, that lets the listener connect to something true to life. “O, this world was made for ending / O, this world was made for ending,” Simkoff repeats on “Planes Like Vultures”, which begins with ghostly detached vocals and then builds into emotionally charged layers of piano, drums and overlapping vocals. In the song’s last line, Simkoff turns again to hope: “By the blinding light our prayers are answered / By the blinding light our fears are conquered.” More specific to the music, Le Loup, a seven-piece from Washington D.C., have done well melding and arranging a variety of instrumentation (piano, organ, banjo, guitar, keyboard, drum machine, and more) and hymnal-like layering of vocals (all members sing), in the end achieving textured, touching sounds that wrap its listeners in mystifying detachment, peculiar beauty and a comforting sense of looking at life, at the world, from some safe unknown place. “O, love is shaped like cities burning,” Simkoff sighs on “Breathing Rapture” atop a gently plucked banjo and xylophone, and a heavenly amalgam of la-la-la’s. “Sifting through the ashes after / We will find your life in laughter / O, the black and breathing rapture.”