Le Tigre

i don't think i will be able to listen to this

i am a total stan for the first few years of le tigre material. this song... yikes. i would emphatically rather listen to "in a world gone mad." which i'm confused to realize actually had two simultaneous ILM threads during its time in the spotlight.

I like this! it's at least a minute longer than it needs to be, though

it sounds like all their other music

ehhh i mean it sounds like, say, a lesser album track on This Island but not all their other stuff sounds like that. and the writing is way way worse.

I tried twice and still haven't made it through all of the first chorus.

This I have to hear.

Kinda surprised she's in a forest w/ dead leaves for the video shoot - ya can get lyme disease more than once!

where are you guys hearing this?

http://pitchfork.com/news/68698-le-tigre-return-with-new-video-for-pro-hillary-clinton-song-im-with-her-watch/

That's it, I'm voting for Trump now

this vs. Eminem's "Mosh"

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, October 19, 2016 5:12 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/eminem-blasts-trump-supporters-on-new-song-campaign-speech-w445632

I'm getting flashbacks of "The country's getting ugly and there's more in store. But don't blame me 'cause I voted for Gore."

the YAAS QUEEN'ing of Hillary is not going to age well

does ilx have a thread for looking back at pop songs about George W Bush and the war on terror a decade or so on?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fi/thumb/0/0c/Rock_Against_Bush_Vol_1.jpg/260px-Rock_Against_Bush_Vol_1.jpg

Hmmm, there's 21st Century Political Songs - started in '06. Kind of a list thread but could be ripe for transformation into a retrospective discussion.

It's so bad I want to cry.

It's so bad it reminds you that Le Tigre were always shit.

^^^ bummed at posts like this one. first album, mr. lady EP, and at least half of feminist sweepstakes are all great and i remember a really fantastic energy when i saw them live in 2002. they were great.

^^^ Yes. I still love that first album and FS a hell of a lot. But this song is just embarrassing.

only ever heard the first album but i heard it a lot back in the day and loved it.

this is like, i dunno, i feel bad for bashing such a positive message but its just so so bad. like anti-hollywood-piracy rap bad. makes Don't Copy That Floppy sound like Bohemian Rhapsody.

It's so bad it reminds you that Le Tigre were always shit.

Yeah, I have to admit that I wasn't coming to this as a fan of their other work.

weird coincidence, yesterday was a bad day for 'Le Tigre' all over: http://host.madison.com/wsj/entertainment/dining/blog/bar-news-le-tigre-lounge-is-closing-down-temporarily/article_cf498e19-3da3-57b0-b36b-50762d8b2fbe.html

(strange local dive bar that's supposedly a favorite of David Lynch)

first album, mr. lady EP, and at least half of feminist sweepstakes are all great

Yeah, this, and they were great live. This Island was rubbish though.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1332-le-tigre-on-how-a-tampon-jingle-became-their-hillary-anthem-im-with-her/

this interview is pretty illuminating, it all makes sense now

Just today, I saw two things on my personal Facebook feed that were negative Hillary messages, and I really couldn’t believe it at this late point in the game given how much we have to lose.

this sounds like half the posts in the ILX political threads

I think there are a couple good tracks on This Island at least. Never bought it, but I think "After Dark" is pretty solid if a bit of a period piece by this point... reminds me of things like Enon's "In This City" - a particular kind of spacey beeps and burbles in the background, a certain receding of an earlier noisiness for something still within the same sonic wheelhouse, but cooler, cleaner, simplified. I didn't really like that, versus the willingness to go for denser-feeling, sometimes muffled and out-of-tune samples on the debut (following on from the Julie Ruin album, which I love). Basically they got further and further from being a four-track home recording kind of project and being a corny indie fuxxor I think that made me lose interest. (Also that remix EP was suuuch a waste of eight bucks or whatever and burned a lot of goodwill among us broke college kids.)

Always kinda liked "Don't Drink Poison" and the "I'm So Excited" cover (though it didn't need to be an album-closer).

listening to the s/t today in honor of the haters. it still sounds great. maybe better than i remembered. the big uptempo anthems still pack a punch but i just love all the murky, "sample is playing at a slightly wrong speed" tracks. interesting meeting point between what hanna was already doing with julie ruin --- "the the empty" is the child of "aerobicide" e.g. --- and, i'm guessing, themes of interest to sadie benning and her experiences as a filmmaker. "slideshow at free university" and "dude yr so crazy" especially. but overall it's got a nice sonic range while feeling very much of a piece.

ah fuck i totally forgot about "les and ray!" this is giving me goosebumps. beautiful tribute - flipside to the heralded heroes of "hot topic," here it is two anonymous neighbors and how much their music could mean to a child in an unbearable situation. this and "eau d'bedroom dancing" weave so much heart and warmth and inclusiveness into this album.

i remember loathing the AMG review (michael gallucci) which declared nastily that hanna's "politically charged agenda sounds a little callous and simple. And that's no accident: Hanna is simple." obviously that's super condescending and obnoxious - i mean, fuck you, dude - but it also just seemed to bear no relationship to her actual musical track record, like he read the press release, made up his mind about these feminists and started writing the review right there. ugh anyway.

just put on from the desk of mr. lady now. weird release IMHO, since the second album came out just a few months later. were they on tour? or trying to find a home for a group of tracks that didn't mesh as well with the album material? i dunno, i think i would rate feminist sweepstakes much higher if it had swapped in some of these cuts - "bang! bang!" is one of hanna's most immediate, shocking and chilling protest songs. sadly the circumstances have not changed and it still seems very very current. i do remember it being louder and punchier - maybe something a bit muddy in the mix on spotify, i don't know.

and "get off the internet" is great too even if the slogan-esque quality of the chorus is a little flat. always liked "gone b4 yr home," totally different kind of track with the warm, basic casio-demo backing track, but the cut-in monologue stuff is really well-taken, as on the debut and on "they want us to make a symphony..." which is more of a texture/in-between track and would work better on an album than an EP. i think the only outright throwaway here is "yr critique" which just seems like background music for the kind of miscellaneous weird looking videos they would play before/during their shows. "mediocrity rules" is fine and reminds me of the importance of a certain kind of humor with this band - "yabba dabba dude!" but i'm not as interested in its buzzy guitar-plus-drum-machine sound. my memory of the next album is that it goes way too much for that but maybe i'll be proven wrong. putting on feminist sweepstakes now and right out the gate, "LT Tour Theme" is totally an off-kilter sample-based song despite a bit of shredding later on so maybe i'm wrong...

ehhh you know this album's pretty good! i stand by feeling that it would be more interesting if it had like one or two fewer of the guitar-and-drum-machine tracks (i'd rethink "my art" and "shred a"), and added a couple of the from the desk... tracks. but it makes sense that having been touring for a while as an actual band, they would be writing songs that give a band more to do in a live setting than hit "play" on the sampler or w/e. and i mean who am i to tell them that the anger and political momentum they're channeling (and which they absolutely shared with their fanbase) doesn't call for a strident, aggressive, unrelenting sound? "FYR" was always great, too, and its urgency - ground is being lost, it must be gained back - pairs well with the joy in progress that you find in "dyke march 2001." "keep on livin'" is a killer closer too.

there's actually a little more sampling than i always think of as being here - i think it's just recorded a lot more cleanly, the vocals are higher, and the samples are more often accents to keyboard or guitar loops played by the band (for example on "well well well"). there are still some surprises too, like the elephant 6-y horns on "TGIF" (one of the best songs here, it goes places). "cry for everything bad that's ever happened" is basically a first-album track without vocals and ends up sounding oddly eno-esque. it's cool and it sets up the roar of "keep on livin" well although i do wish it had some vocals or something else going on.

overall there's a lot to like here. could use a few more "little touches" but it's not really as samey a listen as i remember. i think the lyrics are probably more consistently outward-directed and capital-P political - the first album finds a number of other spaces in which to assert claims, e.g. "deceptacon"'s furious boredom with generic indie dude bands - but it'd be a laugh for me to tell them that's a bad thing. this concludes my sunday afternoon le tigre liveblog, thanks for reading and be sure to follow us on livejournal and diaryland.