Le Tigre: Feminist Sweepstakes

Kathleen Hanna has built her career on exposing the beguiling power of sloganeering, which she both derides as a hideous force and employs as a weapon in her fight to fuse identity politics with pop music. That kind of self-contradiction plays out in extreme measures on Feminist Sweepstakes, the second album by Hanna's post-Bikini Kill band Le Tigre. On its self-titled 1999 debut, Le Tigre made a clean break from traditional punk, dolling itself up with new-wave sounds that made the didactic feminist screed an unlikely party accessory. Lacking some of its predecessor's musical inventiveness, Feminist Sweepstakes revisits similar terrain, but Hanna's increasing bitterness makes it hard to tell whether even she believes what she's saying. The album opens with Hanna singing, "For the ladies and the fags, yeah, we're the band with the roller-skate jams," a playfully self-aware proclamation that sounds a bit defeatist compared to the scathing songs that follow. On "FYR" (that's Fifty Years of Ridicule), she seethes against hetero-male oppression with lines like, "Can we trade Title IX for an end to hate crime RU-486 if we suck your fuckin' dick … Yeah, we got all the power getting stabbed in the shower, and we got equal rights on ladies' night." Hanna is a crafty writer who can give song lyrics the weight of a master's thesis, but she often sounds tired and resigned this time out, postponing the good fight to spend a day in bed on "Much Finer" and raging against droll office jobs on "TGIF," a song as lifeless as its subject matter. Musically, the album presents a pared-down version of Le Tigre's kitchen-sink electronica, with better production that gives its broken beats and Go-Go's-like keyboard vamps room to breathe. But Sweepstakes' spottily exhilarating mix of purist preaching and joyful abandon also suggests a band less inspired by its own purpose.