FEATURE:
Second Spin
Le Tigre – This Island
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THE final album from the legendary Le Tigre…
This Island is one that did not get the true positivity and reception it deserved. Released on 19th October, 2004, it was the only one from the New York icons put out on a major label (Universal). Although it only reached 130 on the Billboard 200, it is amazing album that has some of Le Tigre’s best work on it. After their second album, Feminist Sweepstakes, in 2001, the band finished touring duties and they were going to head to North Carolina. As New York studios were expensive, this would allow the trio more flexibility and time. Armed with poppier songs that their previous work, Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman and JD Samson created something spectacular. Instead of moving, they stayed in New York and used their touring money to record at home studios and use Pro Tools. Rather than go into a studio and record in a formulaic or ordered way, Le Tigre could patch together and work on an album at their own pace and how they wanted. Whilst not as radical and urgent as their epic and hugely influential eponymous debut of 1999, This Island is an album that is worthy of new listening and wider reach. I have not heard any of the songs from the album played on the radio recently. Seconds, New Kicks and TKO are golden Le Tigre cuts! Before coming to a couple of positive reviews for This Island – the reception was mostly positive, though there were quite a few less enthusiastic reviews -, DIY revisited the importance of Le Tigre’s final studio album back in 2017:
“From the very beginning - since their self-titled debut album in 1999 - Le Tigre have turned brash, abrasive electropop into their own form of rebellion. After the exit of original member and visual artist Sadie Benning, the trio we still recognise today was complete. Kathleen Hanna and musical zine-making badass Johanna Fateman were joined by activist and artist J.D. Samson, who became an integral part of the band for their second album ‘Feminist Sweepstakes’. Parodying tunnel-vision hero worship (“Misogynist!” “Genius!” yelled their debut album cut ‘What’s Yr Take On Cassavetes?’) and proudly refusing to stop creating on the now-infamous ‘Hot Topic’, theirs was a band fuelled by aggressive, visceral wit; serious debate dissolving into comical silliness at a moment’s notice. Hilarious, political, and a danceable revolution, Le Tigre kept it short and sickly-sweet with a trio of brilliant records, never ones to fade out in a half-arsed fizzle.
Their final outing before going on hiatus in 2006 was ‘This Island’, a jarring (and, bizarrely) major label album that sounded more like an underground smash. Deliberately isolating itself by title, and sonically infiltrating the mainstream pop world, it’s a whip-smart record that both embraces and parodies radioplay and fame, all while donning fight-ready boxing gear and prom-worthy suits for ‘TKO’s video.
Hilarious, political, and a danceable revolution, Le Tigre kept it short and sickly-sweet with a trio of brilliant records.
So limb-possessing is ‘This Island’ in fact, that’s it’s easy to miss the dry humour that surges through the whole record; at clear odds with the idea that political music must be earnest and sombre. On ‘Nanny Nanny Boo Boo’, Le Tigre boast of having “dicks done by C.P. Caster” (an American artist who creates plaster-casts of rock stars’ penises, fyi), while protest anthem ‘New Kicks’ samples a newsreader listing off countless cities where anti-war protesters have taken to the streets, before she concludes “AND I AM ONLY NAMING A FEW!” Meanwhile, in ‘Viz’, J.D Samson’s ubiquitous moustache sees her instantly ushered straight into a lesbian bar where freedom and debauchery awaits: “they call it way too rowdy, and I call it finally free”. And then, who can forget their brilliantly ludicrous take on The Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m so Excited’?
Wonky, tricky-to-palate pop warped through the ferocious bleeps of an early noughties internet modem, several gas turbine combustors, and a synth cranked up to breaking point, Le Tigre were the very essence of refusing to conform. After all, what could be more rebellious than cloaking sex and provocation in big, bold, commercial pop? While they won’t rule out a reunion altogether - and the trio did briefly get back together last year to release ‘I’m With Her’ in support of Hillary Clinton - don’t count on it happening until they’ve got something new to say. This lot do not do things by halves”.
Ending on a high with an album that had to fit into the scene of 2003/2004 – more Pop-driven and different-sounding to the one they launched into in the late-1990s -, This Island is a fine album with many highlights. This is what The A.V. Club offered in their 2004 review of This Island:
“The distance between Kathleen Hanna's old band, Bikini Kill, and the hooky dance-pop of her trio Le Tigre seems considerable, but it may not be as profound as it first appears. Bikini Kill grated on the ears with angry noise and angrier rhetoric. Le Tigre happily covers the Pointer Sisters and signs to a major label. But the message hasn't really changed much—only the delivery system has. A crowd that will move to "I'm So Excited" is easy to motivate to dance as it shouts down Bush, contemplates the sexual politics of personal presentation, and chants along to righteous feminist statements.
Ahead of the New York hipster curve, Le Tigre looked to post-punk experimentalism and new-wave theatricality for inspiration on its self-titled 1998 debut. The band hasn't learned many new tricks since then, but it hasn't really needed any. After the hit-or-miss sophomore disc Feminist Sweepstakes, This Island finds Hanna, Johanna Fateman, and J.D. Samson further refining their pop instincts while increasing the intensity. Hanna screams "You make me sick" over and over again on "Seconds," but the band remains committed to making its political pill go down as easy as possible. "New Kicks" glues mile-wide guitar riffs to a skittering beat, chanted slogans, and anti-war spoken-word samples from Susan Sarandon, Al Sharpton, and others.
Only one track—the sultry, defiant "Tell You Now"—survives from some sessions produced by Ric Ocasek, but the rest of the album uses memorable tunes to smuggle in messages of hope and rage by the same method Ocasek used to sneak in lyrics of obsession and sadness. Le Tigre even tips its hand on the unnervingly catchy "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo," singing "we synchronize our movements 'til they're super-sick… we love to see the crowd move" before suggesting "it's just a joke." Of course, there's more to This Island than that. It's a crossover gesture with no interest in compromise, and though it could probably only have come from the Manhattan Island of the title, it should find an audience far beyond the banks of the Hudson”.
The final inclusion is Drowned in Sound’s take on This Island. It is an album that is a fitting and very strong farewell from the very much-missed and unique Le Tigre:
“There’s a pretty big leap between the strong woman and the woman brave enough to throw around the F word. Yes that’s right, whisper it, we’re talking about…_ feminism. Bringing up the secret – but very real – war on women’s rights is tantamount to telling your friends to go buy bottled water and gaffer tape in preparation for a terrorist attack in Alabama… _oh wait!
OK, so Fred Durst And The Misogynist Boy Brigade have been temporarily thwarted. That’s all well and good, but there’s still the pressing threat of messer Bush removing that rather controversial of rights, abortion, along with a whole list of legislature to keep women’s pay low and those pesky ‘liberals’ at bay.
Kathleen Hanna is a woman who has never been afraid to stand up for what she believes in and shout it from the rooftops. Whether thrashing out punk anthems Bikini Kill or turning out dancefloor-ready disco pop as on ‘This Island’, Hanna has always had something to say, and never has her message sounded so clear.
When Kurt Cobain noted that “even liberals don’t like smart women,” he wasn’t lying. Those people who tut about the war from their armchairs would cringe at much of this album, particularly ‘Viz’ – a butch lesbian anthem written from the firsthand experience of Le Tigre’s JD Samson. Nor would they likely appreciate the rather blunt protest song ‘New Kicks’. But if we can’t rely on these gals to tell it like it is, who exactly can we?
All of which is rather a shame, considering that those same people will be missing out on the rather brilliant ‘TKO’, the after hours charm of ‘Tell You Now’ and their rather smashing cover of The Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’. Still, striking the balance between preaching to the converted and selling a million albums has never really been top of Hanna’s agenda”.
If you have not listened to Le Tigre’s final album, This Island, then I would advise you to do so. One of the best albums from 2004, it is still sounds incredible to this day. With the peerless Kathleen Hanna in your ranks, I think it is impossible to make anything other than amazing music! Although it has not sold a massive amount, and there are no signs of Le Tigre returning, This Island is a brilliant finale from a group who are staggering. I definitely miss…
THEIR brilliant music.