Around 2004, there was a moment where many of the bands from the then-insurgent dancepunk wave signed with bigger labels that didn't quite know what to do with them. So Radio 4 and Hot Hot Heat and, yeah, Le Tigre, aimed to make a dent in the dying alt-rock radio format, burnished off their edges, polished up their guitars, and cranked out records that worked as anonymous, lifeless versions of the fiery, exciting music that'd made them interesting in the first place.
Of all those bands, Le Tigre might've been the saddest story. When they first roared into existence five years earlier, they took the rip-snorting howl that Kathleen Hanna had perfected leading Bikini Kill and used it for something new: rudimentary but guns-blazing dance-pop that kept all the energy of her older band. Hanna had that same withering sneer and dizzy joy in her voice she always had, but now she was using it to make amped-up party jams like "Deceptacon", a song that felt like a new world opening up the first time you heard it. But by the time they got to 2004's Universal bow This Island, much of that livewire vitality was gone. Their message was still a righteous beacon of feminist unity, but their choruses just weren't sticking anymore, and the group pretty much blinked out of existence soon after.
JD Samson wasn't in Le Tigre when they released that clarion call of a debut album, but she was on board by the time they dropped the still-pretty-great follow-up, Feminist Sweepstakes. And now that Le Tigre have been on hiatus for the better part of a decade, she's the first of the group's three members to work up an album's worth of material. In MEN, she's crewed up with friends Michael O'Neill and Ginger Brooks Takahashi, but she's the leader and figurehead of the group, the visible member. Visibility is a big concept for Samson. With her strikingly masculine appearance, Samson's mere existence has probably helped more than a few kids develop some confidence of their own. That's the idea, anyway; in a recent L.A. Weekly interview, Samson says that her main goal in Le Tigre was always to reach the queer kids. And that keeps going with MEN; plenty of the songs on their debut album are pitched as anthems: "We want some options/ There is a way." And that's great; but unfortunately, those sentiments are still musically stuck in that 2004 moment that destroyed so many promising bands.
To hear Samson tell it, the Le Tigre of This Island had worked hard on their music-making ability, and they could do things that they weren't able to do a few years earlier; that leap toward competence is what drove away so many of the longtime fans who loved their DIY edge. Except she's only got the story half-right; that DIY edge went a long way toward making the band dangerous and unpredictable and willing to devote an entire (great) song to their own conflicted feelings about the filmmaker John Cassavetes. Talk About Body builds itself around outmoded ideas of what moves dance floors; the beats are slick and professional enough that they've got no trace of any punk-rock basement-show roots, but they aren't big or inventive enough that they can carve out dancefloor space next to the Ke$has of the world. And virtually the whole album stays locked in the same midtempo clippety-bloop rut-- processed guitars, dinky keyboard riffs, total lack of dynamics. MEN want to reach as many people as possible, but the way to make a pop-music impression is not to be boringly professional.
Samson's sloganeering could use some work, too. If you're trying to write a song about the challenges of raising kids feminist, you're going to need to come with something more nuanced than "Radical politics/ Sontag in the crib". Also, "multimedia performances" is the sort of phrase that just isn't meant to be sung. If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time. Maybe Talk About Body will be a big help to some kids who really need it; I don't know. But if you don't need the album, you probably won't have much use for it, either.
