Le Loup : The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/leloupthethroneofthethird.jpg" alt=" " />Washington, D.C. singer/songwriter Sam Simkoff marries folk and hell on Le Loup’s debut release, <em>The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General...
7.5 Hardly Art
2007 

 Washington, D.C. singer/songwriter Sam Simkoff marries folk and hell on Le Loup’s debut release, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. The extremely long title is derived from the work of fifties-through-seventies folk artist James Hampton, but much of the material inside is inspired by Dante’s Inferno.  And the record is similarly a strange, striving, bold, and interesting mash-up, of outdoorsy folk and echoed, reverbed effects.

Throne opens with “Canto I” (the name of the first chapter of Inferno – the second-to-last track is named “Canto XXXIV”, after the last chapter), a quiet, nature-loving folk with the conversational description of a dream laid over it.  Like a dream, it somehow all makes sense to the ear.  Overall, there’s a definite dream-like quality to Throne, not in an airy, gossamer sense, but rather in the truly metaphysical, unreal, squaring-the-circle kind of way.  The strongest explorations of this are at the beginning and nearer the end, such as with the following “Planes Like Vultures.”  The number features the haunting, effective, repeated line of “Oh, this world was made for ending”, over ‘in the round’ background vocals and occasional post-rock guitars, both unique and impressive.  Meanwhile, there’s a low-tech indietronic style, with a perfect chorus, on “Outside Of This Car, The End Of the World!”

After all that unusualness, Throne unfortunately repeats itself a bit, to less effect.  “To the Stars! To the Night!” is nice, but a retread of “Canto I”, while the ‘outdoors folk + echoes’ plays again on “Breathing Rapture”, and the echoes get a bit overdone on “Look To the West.”  But “Le Loup (Fear Not)” mixes nature and echoes better, creating a pressing, yet poignant sound, while clean reverb combines with different vocals in different ears in “We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!”

The record ends on two tracks that would have been great, had not too much been added to them.  “Canto XXXVI” plays like the reinvention of “Canto I” that “To the Stars” wanted to be, but has some stand-alone post-rock and electronic effects unnecessarily tacked on as a final third; “XXXVI” would have been bettered served by severing this into another, separate, instrumental track, like the techno-y post-rock sound storm of “(Storm)” and background ooh-ing of “(Howl)”.  And the seven minute-plus finisher “I Had a Dream I Died.” is about three or four of those numbers put together, first folk with strong reverbed choral vocals, then clean ‘in the round’ of “This is the end”, then post-rock amp feedback, then just birds chirping.

In some ways, this conclusion is very representative of The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly: unusual, remarkable, but a bit too many things (one could say the same about the title, too…).  But if Simkoff and his musical collective are too ambitious, that’s not the worst fault in the world.  And this, the second release on Sub Pop’s new Hardly Art imprint (after Arthur & Yu’s In CameraQRO review), shows that ambition can be its own reward.

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