CHICKS ON SPEED RECORDS is proud to announce the exclusive European license of Feminist Sweepstakes, the new album by the New York based band LE TIGRE. LE TIGRE's second full-length release delivers the rollerskate jams, sampler-punk and political dance trax you've come to expect from the trio, and ups the ante for electro-conceptual, feminist pop music everywhere. This time around the LE TIGRE sound seems influenced equally by basement recordings and top-forty electronic production. Sub-bass and breakbeats figure prominently in the loud, live-show oriented song-writing on Feminist Sweepstakes. KATHLEEN HANNA, JOHANNA FATEMAN, and new bandmember J.D. Samson each have solo vocal moments on the album and elsewhere they gang up, finish one another's sentences, or exchange insights. Politically complicated, feminist perspectives inform LE TIGRE's lyrical approach to their subject matter, even as the songs occasionally veer into introspection or absurdity. LE TIGRE's self titled 2000 debut album was out on Mr. Lady (USA) and Wiija (Europe) and has been hailed as an underground classic all round the world:
"the best thing to come out of America this year" STEVE AMACQ/BBC-Radio1;"Ace frankly, and now with added tunes. 4.5/5" Melody Maker; "LE TIGRE: they're grrreat" NME;
" This debut album is a punch-pop delight; "You should buy this fantastic record" Time Out;
"groovy like LUSCIOUS JACKSON but with all the bile and screech of old-skool riot bands, it's a killer combination and one you should hear." i-D
Tracklisting:
1. LT Tour Theme
2. Shred A
3. Fake French
4. FYR
5. On Guard
6. Much Finer
7. Dyke March 2001
8. Tres Bien
9. Well Well Well
10. TGIF
11. My Art
12. Cry For Everything Bad That's Ever Happened
13. Keep On Livin'
LE TIGRE BIO:
In response to the frequent request for a word or two about Riot Grrrl -- what it was, what happened to it, where they stand in relation to it -- Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman and J.D. Samson of LE TIGRE will most likely shrug off a trip down memory lane and pick up where they left off in their long-standing discussion of an as-yet unmade conceptual art project entitled "Riot Grrrl: the remixes" The idea, to reconstruct seminal Riot Grrrl and Queercore recordings as dance-floor hits, appeals to them as a way to traverse genre and critically reference the recent past of the influential underground scene that is inextricable from their personal histories as feminist artists. As an electronic act, the trio are interested in celebrating the radical aspirations of nineties DIY, feminist, punk art rather than romanticizing its achievements or clinging to its style.
Kathleen Hanna, in regard to her image in the media as the angry lead singer of her former band Bikini Kill, remarks without a trace of nostalgia, "I am interested in expanding notions of what it is to be a political artist rather than playing into 'women-in-rock' stereotypes of feminist rage." The band's orignal three members (Kathleen, Johanna, and video artist Sadie Benning who has since left the band for the demands of her independent art career) are long-time friends who met in the early nineties, their paths crossing when Kathleen was touring with Bikini Kill, Sadie was screening her video work, and Johanna was writing and distributing fanzines. In 1998 Kathleen's solo recording project "Julie Ruin" was released and, although living in different cities at the time, the three artists welcomed the opportunity to collaborate, and convened in New York City to put together a live act to tour the record. The project rapidly mutated into an entirely different entity, ultimately known as LE TIGRE, and they released their self-titled debut on Mr. Lady Records and Videos (the Durham-based, multimedia label run by queer video artist/conceptual photographer Tammy Rae Carland and Kaia Wilson of the Butchies) in 1999. J.D. Samson, an integral part of LE TIGRE's live performances and accompanying slide-show from the beginning, formally joined the band for the recording of their second release "From the Desk of Mr. Lady" and subsequent tours of the States, Europe and Japan. While hallmarks of their punk past (like two-chord or single-note guitar riffs) still surface in many tracks, it's as likely to be an imperfectly looped guitar sample as it is an imperfectly played guitar. Although their electronic production has clearly evolved from their rudimentary starting point, the band's cut-and-paste aesthetic has always been fueled by the desire to scavenge pop pleasure from the ideological wasteland of the mainstream and infuse it with radical values. The punk tradition of anti-mastery is still present in their urgent experimentation but there is no insistence on dischordance or minimalism in LE TIGRE's dancey hedonism. The question of "who does what" in the band is difficult to describe concisely as LE TIGRE seems to function as an open-ended collaboration with shifting roles. Each of the members is involved in the conceptual work and execution of ideas which includes tasks such as singing, sampling, choreography, playing guitar, trumpet, or keyboards, writing, and editing video (multi-media from it's inception, LE TIGRE, with the release of their new album "Feminist Sweepstakes" on Mr. Lady in the States and Chicks On Speed Records in Europe, now plans to introduce video projection into their show).
Discography:
Le Tigre - Le Tigre LP/CD (2000)
Le Tigre - From The Desk Of Mr. Lady EP (2001)
Le Tigre - Feminist Sweepstakes LP/CD (2001)
Links:
Chicks
on Speed with Le Tigre
thanks to phinnweb.com!
