Le Tigre / Electrelane - London Islington Academy - 14/10/04
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Electrelane never used to sing, you know. Once upon a time, this foursome was all about lengthy, almost cinematic instrumental keyboard pieces interspersed with delicately plucked guitars - nothing quite so outlandish as a human vocal.
How things have changed - now they positively wail, and that goes both for the voices and the noise coming out of the guitar strings. It's amazing the confidence boost one incredible album ('The Power Out' - get it) can give you, tonight we obtain glimpses of what we take to be all stages of the band; their past, ethereal, understated beauty, their current pop knack and the enticing future plans of one of the most criminally underrated bands around - they may still be shuffling around the stage looking slightly lost, but the newer sound is noisy, pulsating and belligerent. If you can't wait to see where they go next, then you're just as excusably impatient as we are.
Le Tigre weren't ever this blatantly pop either, but gosh-darn it, they've delivered one hell of a pop record in 'This Island' - and tonight, it's milked heavily. Perhaps that explains the ever so slightly more subdued mood to the crowd in comparison with the last time we caught up with the Tigres back in the Astoria a mere six months ago (now that was crazy) - people just aren't quite in love with these tunes yet.
Given time, however, you can expect a good few of them to fall under the category marked 'Le Tigre Classic' - 'After Dark' is unapologetically brash, bold and catchy, 'Nanny Nanny Boo' hip-hop caked in make-up and pulling a funny face. 'Viz' however, that paean to the lifestyle of the butch lesbian, has made the grade already - the kind of song with instructions on how to react to it contained within the lyrics, each directive to 'jump up and down' or 'put our hands in the crowd' carried out as if entirely entranced by that cheeky, squeaky chorus. It's bound to be the overlooked classic of the year.
'Sometimes, I think we're like a really bad teenage TV show,' begins Kathleen Hanna, 'except done by adults, who don't really watch TV, and that's why it's so weird...'
She's got a point - why are all these young kids dancing to the left wing politics of 35 year old women, whose expertise with a DVD player and keyboards (the two pieces of electrical equipment are responsible for near everything you hear and see) takes enormous precedence over their actual skill as musicians?
Quite simply, it is of course all in the tunes, and more specifically, a select handful of the older numbers. What Le Tigre do brilliantly live is keeping the interest at all times (partly due to those backdrop movies - weird cartoon owls, pictures of Aretha Franklin, heck, even the lyrics to the songs...), but sometimes really kicking it in to overdrive with some back-to-back masterpieces. It seems impossible for this band to sound tired, so when they reel off the 'hits', they're each executed with fine precision, deft wit and a primal passion for the cause. 'Keep On' Livin' shakes the soul as well as the booty, 'Deceptacon' is delightfully daft as ever, 'The Empty' marvellously, communally bitchy and 'Hot Topic' bizarrely cut short just when most people had figured out which bits they were meant to join in with.
It all ends, after what seems a slightly paltry sixty minutes, with a top notch cover of The Pointer Sisters' 'I'm So Excited'. Everyone's then ushered out in to the neighbouring bar for what is billed as an after-show party, but is in fact just some blokes with indie-lite warbling tendencies giving us a quite un-requested come-down. To be fair, after Le Tigre, anything would have sounded boring. We leave. The girls have got the better tunes.
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