Last Wednesday night found Le Loup at the Echoplex, and afterwards I talked to lead singer Sam Simkoff about their new album, Family:

Right from its one-word title, Family is a kind of departure from Le Loup’s debut, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. Where Simkoff recorded the latter by himself into a Mac laptop mic with GarageBand, the former rings rich with five-piece collaboration. In recording Family, Simkoff typically brought only lyrics and melody to the studio, where the band would explore different settings until something gelled. The product possesses a very different energy, a live, collective energy fueled by layers of fierce percussion. Found-sound loops introduce ebullient singalongs. Druidic harmonies echo as though from a mountaintop.  Whimsical piano noodling tees up a ’60s R&B love ballad, complete with a drum arrangement worthy of an Ellie Greenwich number.

But the two albums share a common soul. The Throne of the Third Heaven explored an intensely personal vision of death, or life after death; Family suggests a vague but epic pilgrimage from West to East. One track actually inverts the common exhortation, “Go West, young man”, and implores instead, “Go east, go east, go east, go east, go”. Ascending chromatic lines recur throughout as a theme, like footsteps up a mountainside. We’ve still got the lone banjo in the wilderness from Throne, but it’s joined by a litany of acoustic companions, strumming triumphantly and/or reverently to the insistent drums that drive the album to its enlightened conclusion.

Despite the lush group harmonies and excitable passages of Le Loup’s debut, it seems, by comparison, a lonely album, foraging for a sense of hope and place. Family delivers the product of that search, trading canned beats and a tinny laptop sound for the warm embrace of collaboration with trusted partners. In retrospect, the wordy The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly now seems less like a willful gesture in album titling and more like compensation, as though the artist kept the company of words more than people.

If “concept album” is a dirty word, let’s instead call Le Loup’s albums “high concept”. They’re not just elegantly consistent with themselves, they’re consistent with each other in grand artistic vision, a style that might be called baroque granola. At moments, Family might teeter dangerously on world music to the unfamiliar ear, like it’s just a children’s choir and didgeridoo away from a Rainforest Café soundtrack. And Throne literally featured two minutes of digitally degraded thunderstorm, closing with another two minutes of atmospheric birdsong. If that’s not concept, I’m not sure what would be. But to me, concept isn’t a dirty word. It may have been sullied by the likes of Chris Gaines and Bobby Digital, but those are commercial works. Simkoff’s ideas are anything but commercial — they’re art. And what drives fine art more than a strong concept?

Family is a great album, and a great companion piece to Throne. Even without looking too deeply into the concept driving it, it is at turns bright, and reverent, and cheery, and serious, and hopeful, and sincere. And finding a consistency to its range of moods is no small feat in itself. But it’s also fun to listen to, and to sing along to. And it’s not often you find that in high concept, or fine art.