Family, the second album from hometown heroes, Le Loup, is finally out (get it on Hardly Art.com) and their national tour has finally begun. Let’s listen to what Le Loup has been up to away in that little cabin in the Maryland woods with their weird musical toys…..

BEACH TOWN
Throughout recording, we were fascinated by the idea of the fundamental interplay between a strong rhythm and a basic melody- those two ingredients seem to me to be what makes music so entrancing, and so we tried to stress that relationship as much and as strongly as possible throughout the album.  Beach town is mostly just drums, percussion, atmosphere and vocals for the chief portion of the song.  Instruments only burst through at the very end, to give it a sort of cathartic release.  Although the first half is incredibly sparse and repetitive, I find it entrancing, and oddly more engaging than the second half.  The song is about an old decrepit beach town near where I grew up- it used to be a big resort town with a fairground and arcade and fancy restaurants- that’s been continually falling apart up to present times.  There’s something, or a lot of things, really, about the town that strike me as very sad.  But even when a place is falling back to entropy, there’s a real beauty there- just because something is disintegrating and no longer as useful and polished as it once was doesn’t mean it’s ugly.  We tried to mirror those images of decrepitude with obscure production- heavy atmospherics that threaten sometimes to drown out the main point- because sometimes I like having to dig a melody or particularly nice instrument line out of the murk more than I like the melody itself, if that makes sense.

GROW
This song is about the possibility of starting a family.  The lyrics are pretty simple, but only because I couldn’t quite wrap what I was thinking up into a tidy bundle.  There’s a distinct tension between the joy of considering having kids and settling down, and the terror of losing your own youth and independence.  It’s ultimately supposed to be an optimistic song, though.  I’m pleased with this song as a whole, I think it’s the one of the most immediately accessible on the album.  There are very specific parts within the song, however, that make me especially happy.  The first time the group vocals kind of spill drunkenly out of that ordered, mannered first verse, the bell-like guitar lines that rise through in the end, and the drums, drums, drums.

FORGIVE ME
This song was completely unexpected.  We recorded it as kind of a band exercise on the very last day of recording the entire album- it was never supposed to be there.  I’d written it a few weeks earlier, and we’d never gotten around to playing it as a band.  What you hear on the album is maybe the second or third time we’d ever played it.  We were in this huge wooden room with a cathedral cieling, and everybody had their instruments plugged into two or three amps, each amp routed through a different effects pedal.  The vocals were given the same treatment, diluted through a few different amp systems and then mic’ed and delayed.  So all this sound was just bouncing around and morphing and distorting in a really neat way, and became this indistinguishable mash.  but in a good way!  As soon as we heard the result, we were convinced we needed to put it on the record somewhere.  For all the editing and careful composing and months and months of production that we put into every other song, this track was recorded live and edited in a matter of a few hours.  We barely touched it in terms of editing- the whole process was much more reactive and playful than carefully planned.  I think it comes through in the music in a really nice, powerful way.

GO EAST
This song, I think, has a lot in common thematically with ‘Beach Town.’  Again it deals with a particular town, and treats it almost as a person with human qualities.  The places we grow up, like people, change over a lifetime- physically, they shift, become more beautiful or fall to disrepair; in terms of personality, they change incrementally until they have a completely different flavor; emotionally, the way we deal with those towns changes as well, until we might perceive a place to be entirely foreign to us, even if we knew and loved it dearly as children.  Only a little of this comes out in the sparse lyrics, but I think we conveyed a certain sort of weight just in the dark, murky instrumental arrangement.

NEAHKAHNIE
Obviously the same lyrics as “Beach Town,” plus a final verse.  We were interested in taking those words and the general melodic structure, though, and changing the emotional weight of it all just by changing the surroundings.  In this way, the words are the same on a basic level, but the meaning shifts completely- it’s a lot more sentimental and exuberant, not as dark and pessimistic- suddenly looking back fondly on something that passed away, and accepting what it’s become.  Same words and melody, but it’s an entirely different song.  It reminds me of being on the beach at night.

http://www.theottobar.com/“>Le Loup has their CD release party tonight at Ottobar
with NURSES, WE READ MINDS and EUREKA BIRDS
Doors open at 8pm/ Show at 9pm- ALL AGES

Perinent websites:
http://www.myspace.com/leloupmusic
http://www.hardlyart.com/
http://www.theottobar.com/

and keep your eyes peeled for an awesome/exclusive feature on them as they storm through DC in a couple of weeks.