Staying in the Loop With Le Loup

If there’s one striking thing about Sam Simkoff, the front man of D.C. indie collective Le Loup, it’s how he straddles the continuum of time. For starters, the majority of the source material for Le Loup’s debut album, which Simkoff wrote before the band’s current incarnation was in place, is inspired by Lit Hum’s own Dante Alighieri. The first and second-to-last songs on the disc, respectively, are titled Canto I and Canto XXVI—the Inferno’s bookends, for those who don’t remember.

Fast-forward about six-and-a-half centuries and you might stumble upon James Hampton’s sprawling 1950s folk art project, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, after which Simkoff named Le Loup’s first album. The band itself, though, is planted firmly in the present, from its multilayered banjo-baroque style to the story of its inception—Simkoff put an ad on Craigslist for bandmates after college graduation. According to Simkoff, “Four of the other band members came to the first meeting—the keyboardist and the three guitarists.” Along with Simkoff’s banjo and vocals, two percussionists who joined later, and a laptop aficionado, Le Loup was born.

It’s tempting here to explain exactly what’s meant by “banjo-baroque,” and in doing so to employ a few familiar comparisons. There are elements of Animal Collective in Le Loup’s music, and of Sufjan Stevens, too. It’s off-kilter enough and complex not to be called folk, but dissect a track and its components sound a little folksy (or a little like airplanes, or a little like insects buzzing).

These quick assessments don’t bother Simkoff much—he’s self-aware enough to understand the critic’s position. “If you’re describing a new band,” he says, “that’s the most convenient context.” Of course, early reviews of the album have also likened Le Loup to the Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene—which Simkoff attributes largely to the bands’ sizes. “I don’t think we sound much like the Arcade Fire at all. It would be flattering if we did. The Arcade Fire are awesome. But I’ve never really gotten that connection.” What comparison, then, would Simkoff prefer to see? “Destroyer. We don’t sound anything like him, either, but in terms of sheer dramatics—his music’s very hyperbolic.”

It’s a good word to throw around with Le Loup’s music, as well. And in the face of detractors who might say no band needs three guitars—four, if you count sometimes-guitarist Christian Ervin—Simkoff’s not likely to argue. “I think a strong argument could be made that many bands don’t need three guitarists. And it’s perfectly fair, but I just saw Broken Social Scene with Kevin Drew, and they had four guitars up there. ... When I first wrote the songs, I wrote overlapping patterns. The idea was that the simple patterns would overlap each other and really create something bigger, musically.”

It’s an interesting answer, since James Hampton’s sculpture was made with a similar objective in mind. Hampton created the sculpture over 14 years with about 180 objects he scavenged from his garage and wrapped in foil; the end result is nine feet high and takes up about 200 square feet of space. Hampton also scrawled verses from the Book of Revelations on the artwork, and the words “Fear Not” are prominently displayed in its center.

Simkoff can get on board with that. “I was immediately kind of taken by it. It’s obviously homemade and stuck together,” but he was struck by “the care with which it was assembled.” There’s something earnest about Hampton’s work, which Simkoff has come across several times in the National Portrait Gallery in the band’s hometown, Washington, D.C., and it’s the same kind of earnestness that can be heard in The Throne. Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, the sculpture is something of a monument to the divine.

It makes sense, then, that Simkoff would find something with which to identify in both Hampton’s Throne and Dante’s Inferno. “I had just read the Inferno for the first time, and the interesting thing about the Divine Comedy is that it can be seen as a metaphor for Dante’s midlife crisis. Obviously, Dante’s context was much more extreme, but I think everybody goes through that, and I was in a transition period. I had just graduated college, I was trying to figure out what to do.” In the interest of full disclosure, though, it should be noted that Simkoff hasn’t yet read the rest of the Divine Comedy—he says his English-major friends at Kenyon scared him away from “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”.

The final song on Le Loup’s album, “I Had a Dream I Died,” closes with Simkoff’s distorted voice singing “This is the end” over and over. This is followed with three minutes of white noise and birds chirping. It’s an appropriate end for an album both peculiar and dramatic, and Simkoff’s take on it is typically mature for a guy who graduated college just a year-and-a-half ago. “Ironically enough,” he says, “I saw that song as the most optimistic song on the album. Obviously, it’s about, sort of, final preparations—but it’s done as and thought of as being ready for all that lies ahead, and doing things gracefully.”

That, of course, can’t be all Sam Simkoff has to say on the subject. He laughs, maybe a little ruefully. “It’s kind of like Dante emerging from Hell,” he adds, “glimpsing Paradise for the first time.”