Did the Association ever let the banjo play, to take us out for a wining and a dining? It's one of the first thoughts that clambers into the noodle when Le Loup's "Go East" starts playing, when that waterfall of voices crests and then tumbles over the worn down, rocky ledge together, sending a spectacular rush into your wheelhouse. The windy has spoken and it has stormy eyes, but the band from this nation's capital wear the sheep's clothing more oft than it does not, providing a bed of undulous growths and steamings, of naturally occurring geysers and gently waving fields of wheat and prairie grasses that were all that could be seen past a Mississippi River and of the broad span of trees just on the other side of the Cumberland Gap.It's inconspicuous and without the threatening risk of claws and pointy teeth, of master plans and schemes, breathing down your neck with a carnivore's hotness and musk. It persists like a ribbon of smoke trailing off of an extinguished candle, swimming and escaping, sort of joyous and sort of frightened and temperamental. It is wonderfully ghosty and so much of the best musics - the ones that we find so hard to put our fingers on, to appreciate the full story of their tastes and of the tints and tinctures and ramifications - are the same way, implacably moody and with tendrils that cling to the past and drag us along with them with or against our better wishes. The Washington, D.C., band brings seductive spookiness with them and an indecisive inner voice that takes on a gypsy's constitution of leavings and wanderings, always reaching out to the open country and leaving things behind and staking out for a place to lay some more tracks where they don't fall directly upon so many other tracks. A house is a home, they suggest, but one gets a genuine sense of a restlessness that feels crippling in the songs on the band's latest and fantastic full-length, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, as if they peer out through the windows and just envy those bobbing and weaving birds something fierce. The dark is in spite of the night, in opposition of the night, perhaps. It's a strain to just give in to the night, so there's a good thrashing and gnashing.