Great Fucking Albums #27: Le Tigre (Self-Titled)

Open this link in a new tab and keep reading. We’re going to listen to a song.

Maybe you were cognizant during the 90s. Do you remember Riot Grrrl? If so, you get one point, go to the next question. Do you remember it fondly? You get five points, next question. Are you a dude? Hooray, 20 points and I’m buying you a beer, because I really want to meet you. I’m serious. Where are you guys? A number of conversations I’ve had with other penis-owners about Le Tigre and other Riot Grrrl bands follow a distressingly common structure:

1. Girlfriend is into this new band.
2. Dude forced to listen to record / dragged to show.
3. “Man-hating” experienced!
4. Girlfriend morphs into lesbian and takes flight on majestic labia wings, never to be seen again.

These guys don’t just “not care for” this music, they blame it for ruining their lives. I’m not even— wait, are you listening to the song in the link? Isn’t that just catchy as hell?— Can you be angry or annoyed, but also having a good time? I’ll bet Kathleen Hanna thinks so, and I kinda think that’s what she set out to display with Le Tigre. Bikini Kill was the band that shitty ex-boyfriends needed to hate; shouldn’t they have self-selected out by the time Le Tigre rolled around? It’s like nobody got the memo when the music started being really fun.

The song you’re listening to, “Deceptacon,” neatly encapsulates pretty much everything you need to know about Le Tigre. If you don’t like this song, you probably won’t like the rest of the songs on the album. As a bonus, it pokes fun at NOFX, who, I just decided, are good stand-ins for the kind of nonsense, misapplied-masculinity douchebaggery that permeates… well, practically every music scene ever.

Check out NOFX’s “Kill Rock Stars” (I’d link to audio but I can’t seem to find any other than the Weird Al version— strange!), read the lyrics to Deceptacon, and know that NOFX also has a song called “Linoleum.” Too much work? I’ll break it down for you:

1. Fat Mike sounds like Weird Al if Weird Al were boring and untalented.
2. A lot of guys get really, really defensive when someone points out that they just might, in even a tiny way they didn’t realize, be contributing to a culture that gives gang rape a shrug and a hand-wave and insults, degrades, objectifies and creepily pedolizes women.
3. A lot of music sounds the same and that’s fucking boooooooooooooooooooring.
4. It should be OK for women to do the same things as men, feel safe, and not have people lose their shit over it.

So why does Le Tigre qualify as a Great Fucking Album? Well, it rocks ass, for one thing; it’s also what pop-punk should actually sound like— but probably most impressively, this album is a badass teaching tool for feminism that doesn’t alienate male listeners. If you know a teenage boy, get him this album. With luck, it will open wonderful doors to X-Ray Spex, Sleater-Kinney, Patti Smith, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Screaming Females, and all kinds of other awesome stuff. He will learn that such questions as “what’s it like to be a girl in a band?” are stupid and unnecessary. Most importantly, it will help populate my world with more guys I want to buy a beer instead of slap in the coin purse.

-Zac

Feel Good Together

See if this sounds like enough of a novelty for you: a bunch of drummers in a bunch of Ohio bands (one of which is the Black Keys) get together and form their own band, called (naturally) Drummer. With the attention they might get because their bass player is Patrick Carney, Drummer could be dismissed or otherwise judged differently as some sort of side-project or musical lark. In fact, you might almost expect Drummer’s Feel Good Together to stumble in the same ways the Monsters of Folk album stumbles (more on that later): you might expect it to be astoundingly (or even offensively) less than the sum of its parts.

But albums, regardless of personnel, sink or swim on the music and it turns out that these Ohio drummers have put together a refreshingly solid, musically muscular rock album, one of the better ones I’ve heard this year. I approached Drummer with a lot of trepidation, vowing to listen to  the album at least twice before I rendered a verdict (standard Bollocks! disclaimer: I listen to every album I review a minimum of three times before I write anything about it. Most albums, unless they’re unbearable, make it to 8 or more listens), thinking that it might be a pretty hard slog. But Feel Good Together is stuffed to the gills with stellar musicianship and it is almost shockingly good. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to check out the other bands in which the drummers in Drummer drum. Drummer’s drummer, Greg Boyd, is from Ghostman & Sandman; as previously stated, Black Key Carney plays bass; the awesome lead guitar work on Feel Good Together comes from Jamie Stillman who comes from Teeth of the Hydra; there are keyboards by Steve Clements of Six Parts Seven; and Drummer’s singer is Jon Finley, who sounds like a cross between M. Ward and the Cult’s Ian Astbury and comes from a band awesomely named Beaten Awake. Of all these bands, I’ve only listened to the Black Keys (though I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of Six Parts Seven) and there’s nothing on this album that sounds even remotely like a Black Keys song. I could suggest, therefore, that Drummer sounds like bits of all those other bands but – and here’s something I love – I will have to listen to them all to find out. So it’s like Drummer has given me five new bands to listen to instead of one. And I still loves me some Black Keys. Maybe even enough to check out their rap-rock project, Blak Roc. Maybe.

Feel Good Together is a brief listen at ten tracks, and those tracks are almost gleefully schizophrenic, often burying the vocals deep in the mix (which I don’t always like, mind you, but Finley is able to growl out some catchy melodic hooks here and there and Drummer has some facility for harmony, especially on standout tracks like “Connect to Lounge.”) and cranking the guitars to eleven. The album opens with a keyboard riff straight out of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr. Crowley” before tearing off on its own little rock adventure. Later songs will remind astute listeners of Franz Ferdinand, Broadcast, and other danceable indie, but you can’t really say that Drummer is ripping off those artists either. Feel Good Together, as its artworks suggests, is its own half-melted sundae of pop and rock. Parts of this album, as I make my nth trip through it, even remind me of Hum. Remember Hum? You’d Prefer An Astronaut? “She’s out back counting stars?” No? That’s too bad. They were awesome. (If you do remember Hum and miss them, you can hear their only hit, “Stars”, on the soundtrack for Saints Row 2, where you can drive around killing people and pretending it’s because they didn’t buy Hum’s albums when they had the chance.)

Anyway, there’s not much to discuss regarding Drummer as a lyrical entity because (have I mentioned this?) I have no clue what Jon Finley is singing about. There’s part of one song where he sings, “Are we happy?/ I have no clue.” His vocals are barely intelligible when they’re not buried under every instrument on the album and I am genuinely perplexed as to why this doesn’t annoy the piss out of me. I suppose it could be that Feel Good Together is benefitting from my exceedingly low expectations. The reviews that I read before I heard the album prepared me for, at best, a somewhat interesting mishmash of musical styles that provide a bunch of drummers (well, except for one) a chance to step out from behind their kits. But the album manages to be pretty engaging throughout and though the songs wander a bit, they all fit neatly under five minutes.

Another thing I like about Drummer is that they’re basically an anti-supergroup. In this age of Them Crooked Vultures (I’m still trying to decide if I will listen to that album or not), The Dead Weather, Monsters of Folk, and whatever group the drummer from Cheap Trick and the Fountains of Wayne guy were in, it’s nice to see a band of bandmembers where the most famous dude is one half of a garage blues band from Ohio that is still fairly below the radar for most of America. Drummer, then, is the musical equivalent of the “No-Name Defense” of the 1972 Miami Dolphins; they’re not big stars, but they’re out there every week, kicking ass and taking names. At least, I assume that’s true of the guys in Drummer. And I’d love to believe that the members of the ’72 Dolphins starting D are just running around the country tackling dudes at random. How cool would that be?