Le Loup:
Sound experiment

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

When the Barbary reopened last fall and brought yet another rocking venue to the strip of clubs off of Girard, it promised to be a place where DIY gigs and DJs nights could live side by side.
And the operators also assured us that these gigs wouldn’t just be for the cynical drunkards that the city’s mainly 21-plus scene currently caters to. Barbary shows would be for the kiddies, too.
Now it looks like they’re doing a swell job of living up to those promises by pairing up with Sean Agnew’s R5 Productions, long a purveyor of all-ages shows that feature some the most hyped acts around.
That’s the case at the Barbary, where the music will start plenty early tonight, with doors opening at 6:30.
All ages or not, the Barbary and R5 have teamed up to offer what is bound to be a night of pure musical goodness.
Headliners Le Loup make the trip up from D.C. fresh off a stint at Austin’s SXSW to bring their own brand of weird art-rich indie rock, a blend of poppy lightheartedness and the free-form experimental structures explored by Animal Collective.
The troupe of musicians also has drawn comparisons to an experimentally spiked Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens cocktail. Their sound is made more mad by a mess of (four) guitars, synth, vox, keyboard, some computer modification, and the cacophony of all seven members taking shots at the vocals. Le Loup also brings to the stage an instrument that is more and more making appearances outside of its traditional context: the banjo.
Sure, Illinois has proved that the banjo’s twang can add an edge to ridiculously catchy pop songs; Minnesota virtuoso Paul Metzger has also shown that the banjo is capable of inducing 30-minute bouts of cosmic time travel, among other things.
For Le Loup, though, it becomes yet another launching pad for the hydra-headed weirdness of their fuzzed-out indie rock explorations, and tends to fit in quite fine with the other new-fangled contraptions worked into the mix.
The title of Le Loup’s 2007 debut album, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, hints that the band’s melodic-but-whacked-out songs aren’t just accidentally so, but are indeed consciously artistic creations.
The long-winded title is borrowed from the now-famous sculptural creation of James Hampton, a Washington, D.C., janitor who spent 14 years crafting a spectacular throne for Jesus out of garbage while supposedly witnessing trips to the Capitol by Moses and the Virgin Mary.
Indeed, the group’s biggest hit to date, Fear Not, is also the message scrawled on the placard placed above the messiah’s seat in the sculpture.
As far as the music goes, Le Loup’s songs do teeter toward the kind of wild-eyed mysticism associated with Hampton, and their songs convey the unconventional beauty that might arise from a sacred shrine built from refuse and bric-a-brac.
The much-buzzed Fear Not is one of the band’s more conventional songs, with a steadily driving banjo enshrouded in a warm, humming drone of atmospherics and coupled with pleasantly soft vocals. The rhythmic repetition of supple harmonies doles out a dreamy haze not dissimilar to a less schizophrenic take on Philly’s own freak indie rockers Aunt Dracula.
Listeners get more of the same digestible and catchy sound, albeit minus the banjo, on Outside of This Car, The End of the World! where a decidedly more electronic edge gives backing to mysticism-tinged lyrics.
The album’s We are Gods! We are Wolves! takes on a lighter side, with a doting rhythm of computer bleeps joined by synth, snaps, claps, and generally orchestrated electronica.
Things get even more off the tired, beaten track of expectations, though, with The Sea Took Me On, a live recording released online via the band’s Web site.
Solid keys launch into an angst-ridden ballad, which is soon joined by full-band backing and the sound of an off-kilter elephant. By the time the song ends, a maze of swirling sound melts into a classic rock guitar finish.
This track makes the best case yet that a solid show is in store for those in tune with the emerging live music scene that is beginning to blossom at the Barbary. ••

Check it out . . .
Who: Le Loup
What: Cutting-edge indie-rock experimentation for all
Where: The Barbary, Frankford and Delaware avenues
When: Thursday, March 20. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10.