There's buzz a-plenty around fresh-faced Le Loup: Seattle's KEXP radio station has called their just-released debut "complex and catchy" and "an impressive listening experience." DCist says the band's sound is "something so infectious, so engaging, and so very of-the-moment" that their quick (before fall 2006, Le Loup as such didn't exist) landing on Sub Pop's Hardly Art label makes perfect sense. A tour of the scattered blogs and such that have weighed in on Le Loup turns up bald comparisons to Animal Collective, the Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, and and label-kin the Shins—comparisons which, though only so helpful in describing Le Loup's particular digitized but backwoods-y sound, surging and yearning in layered repetition, do speak volumes about the enthusiasm the band seems to provoke.

What's notable here, particularly in the tightly connected circuit of music blogs hype-makers who are quick to take credit for a group's discovery, is that the band lives up to it all.

Le Loup is comprised of a seven-strong team of Craigslist recruits (disclaimer: a friend of mine from college is one—who cares? They're that good) gathered together to bring band leader Sam Simkoff's studio creations to life. The debut album's title, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly's (also the title of a book of poems by Denis Johnson) melodic ingenuity—much the result of center man Simkoff's solo tinkerings—is praiseworthy in its own right. The record derives from an oddball masterwork of tinfoil, coffee cans, and lightbulbs housed at the Smithsonian—a fitting name for a an album just as cohesive as it is soothingly quirky.—Mythili G. Rao

LINKS
• Le Loup's Internet Throne