Godspeed You Black Emperor!; Kathleen Hanna Returns with Le Tigre's Postfeminist Pop-Electronica

Godspeed's set begins not when its nine members shuffle onstage and pick up their instruments, but when the films begin to roll. Behind the band, projected on an enormous screen at the back of the sage, scratchy letters fly by, like the countdown on the leader of the beginning of a movie, spelling out the title of the band's new album in scrambled order: "Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven." In the middle of the screen is a steady clip-art image of an obscured figure holding up a sign: "Explode." The band has received its instructions and cue, and begins to play.

To call Godspeed's music cinematic is an understatement. They make little epics, beginning with quiet pastoral sounds and building up into ecstatic climaxes over about 12 minutes: perfect long-form music-video length. And like most long-form music videos, it doesn't take long before you figure out the formula behind it, then scratch your head at how unimaginative the formula turns out to be.

In two hours, the band played about a dozen songs, each one studiously adhering to the same three-act plot: the first video scenes are disjointed, repetitive and peaceful, with gentle, aimless atmospherics from the band. Then the film takes direction, the camera often moving through a city or, in the creepiest and most effective film of the show, repeatedly zooming in and out on a homeless man lurking in the shadows of some scaffolding at a busy New York intersection while the world races by, oblivious; here the music grows and builds on the same motives you've been hearing for the last six or seven minutes. Then the riff repeats, louder. And repeats, louder. And then the film ends, and a new song begins.

At some point, I had to ask myself whether I was watching a band or seeing a movie. After a while, the films became more interesting than the music, and in fact in slow spots the musicians turned around and started to watch the films, as though they had run out of inspiration on their own and needed the movie to tell them what to do. At these spots the experience seems the most passive?you and the band watching images pass by like scenes on tv. And like tv, if you've seen the show once, you've seen it 100 times.

Ben Sisario

Le Tigre The Pavilion, Brighton (November 30) The image I take away from this concert is that of Ian Svenonius, that cool guy from the Make Up who clearly esteems both James Brown and Mick Jagger, sipping a glass of Coke in the corner, holding court with a handful of cool hipsters. He looks so timeless there, a scarf thrown round his neck like a schoolboy from another era, raising his face toward the stage where three girls are attempting to run rampant using a skipping rope and a variety of sampled, gritty, bouncy, feminist pop songs.

I lie. The image I take away is that of my fiancee pleading, "Can we go yet?" She hates the whine in Kathleen Hanna's voice, sees no relation between that and her much-loved 60s girl group gangs. She doesn't understand the appeal of their rudimentary hiphop beats or the joy in Kathleen's voice as she queries, "Who took the Bomp from the Bompalompalomp/Who took the Ram from the Ramalamading dong?" on "Deceptacon." Sure, she liked to jump rope back when she was 10, but she's not 10 anymore. Instead of impassioned melancholy and hurt and the several shades of joy in between, all she can hear in Kathleen's voice is an atonal, atypical, spoilt American brat yelp, and one with no grasp of tunes, either.

I'm directly at odds with my fiancee on these points. There's not much I don't love about Le Tigre?from Kathleen's past in Bikini Kill to the two girls on either side of her, one in ferocious blonde wig, the other in fuck-off glasses. Some here have been waiting for Kathleen's reappearance for like seven years, and there's plenty to celebrate?even if much of it is hidden beneath squalls of sudden noise and crowd chanting.

"Hot Topic" is a cool song. It lists all the female motivators Le Tigre like, from Gretchen Phillips to Mr. Lady to the Need, and is good simply through its choice of words. Words are so important, do you not think? Oh and it rules for the way it bounces up and down when performed live. "My My Metrocard" sounds to me exactly like the bastard daughters of the Shirelles let loose in a studio with instructions only to use the most rudimentary of guitar riffs and drum machine motifs. Sorry, fiancee. And "Friendship Station" beats the crap out of all those sub-Beck melees from Cibo Matto and their ilk. Not that it's a competition, of course?

"We were stopped coming into customs and they wanted to know what we did," Kathleen tells us. "So we told them we were musicians and showed them our instruments and everything and they wanted to know what we were called. Le Tigre, we told them, they liked that. So they asked us what sort of music we played and we told them postfeminist pop-electronica. They went silent at that, and then asked: 'What, like Tori Amos?'"

Yeah, that's right. Exactly like Tori Amos.

Everett True