The Breeders, Academy, Birmingham <br></br>Gold Blade, Garage, London <br></br>Le Tigre, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow

There's no such thing as a bad Deal

Twins, they say, are telepathic. When my mother gave birth to me in Cardiff, her same-age sister felt the pain halfway around the world in Oregon. Whether or not such anecdotal evidence stands up to rigorous scientific analysis is perhaps questionable, but it surely isn't stretching credulity too far to suggest that sharing a womb offers an unfair advantage when it comes to making music together. Kim and Kelley Deal are proper identical twins – they both have those Cherokee cheekbones and big American smiles, they both do that finishing-each-other's-sentences thing – and The Breeders' main strength is the innate understanding they have. You can hear it in their deceptively apple-pie harmonies, and you can hear it in the interplay of bass and guitar.

It's the closest The Breeders get to a musical gimmick. The Deals have committed themselves to a principle they call "All Wave", eschewing sound effects and overdubs for a purely analogue sound. For the band, recruited from LA punks XXX, this is second nature, and it works well on the better tracks from TK, their first album in nine years. It's a fair guess, though, judging by the high incidence of "Death To The Pixies" T-shirts, that the majority of a disappointingly small crowd are here because of something Kim did even longer ago than that.

It's a recurring fantasy of mine that Pixies, the band who fused flamenco with punk, surrealism and sexual perversion (and accidentally gave Nirvana their musical blueprint), might reform and repeat some of the best live performances I have ever witnessed. By all accounts, the chances of this are as slim as their lead singer was fat. Unlike Frank Black (the former Black Francis), Kim Deal avoids Pixies material, even her own songs like "Gigantic" and "Into The White".

They drop the greatest hit early on, and it's for the best. The much-sampled "Cannonball" has become so ubiquitous through other people's bootlegs that it's impossible to hear the bassline without expecting Skee-Lo to burst onstage, stand on an orange crate and squeak "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller...". Along with a note-perfect rendition of Nerf Herder's theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's the inevitable highlight of the night.

"Don't encourage my sister to drink", Kim scolds someone who hands her addiction-troubled Kelley a beer, but it won't be long until the less celebrated Deal is partying at the aftershow, fag in mouth, beer in hand. We all need our crutches. Just ask Kieron Dyer.

"Do you believe in the power of rock'n'roll?" Gold Blade's John Robb does, and by the time he's asked us for the twentieth time, we do too. No fags or beer for John – the terrifyingly gym-hardened singer is as straight-edge as they come, his only crutch loud being fast and euphoric music.

If you don't know John Robb, you'll know his face. The boundlessly energetic musician, author, producer, journalist, model and TV star is the Mancunian with the brush-bristle quiff, comic-book cheek bones, superhero physique (at Gold Blade gigs, you could lay spread bets on how many songs he'll last before whipping off his fur bomber jacket and showing off his pecs) and a cheeky glint in his eye, who always crops up on those "I Love The Top Ten Of 1977 Punk" shows.

Gold Blade, however, is his main project: a shamelessly fundamentalist collision of The Ramones, James Brown and The Stooges, typified by the anthemic "Strictly Hardcore" and new single "AC/DC" (which concludes with a cheeky Angus riff). Throughout their set, Robb comes across like a rock'n'roll Billy Graham, bug-eyed and wired on adrenalin, slapping high fives with the front row and bellowing exhortations to join him in his devotion. His band of tattooed rockabilly rebels are backed by the tribal thump of not one but two drummers, both of whom are standing up.

Gold Blade may have their rivals in the testifying punk-rock-soul genre (notably The Make-Up and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), but you won't see a more inspiring, thrilling, enlivening show from any of them.

Long ago, in another life, I got into a spot of bother after beginning a review of Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear's shared album with the semi-humourously provocative line: "In any sense that matters, I'm a woman." I still sort of know what I was getting at: nominally, Riot Grrl wasn't for me, but if it spoke to me on some level – if I got it – then why couldn't I appropriate it anyway? If Bikini Kill weren't for me, then what about frontwoman Kathleen Hanna's new band, Le Tigre? As well as inadvertently changing rock history by spraypainting the words "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" while she and the young Cobain were on a graffiti spree, Hanna has arguably had a far greater influence on the course of feminist culture than, say, Courtney Love. Which is all very well, but the bottom line is that Bikini Kill were an unlistenably cacophonous abomination. Le Tigre, however, are an irresistible proposition. The quantum musical leap Hanna has made from BK to LT is as improbable as the one Tjinder Singh made between Old Cornershop and New Cornershop. Both bands have abandoned messy amateurism for a joyous eclecticism, taking in electro beats, soundbites and loose, danceable rhythms.

The two-thirds female line-up consists of Hanna, sporting a dress that looks like a can of Bud in negative, sidekick Johanna Fateman in identical beehive'n'bangs, and a speccy guy called JD on keyboards and syn-drums who, with his flimsy limbs and wispy tache, resembles a stock Hollywood nerd straight out of a John Hughes movie. At least, that's how it seems until JD announces "On Guard" in a woman's voice, much to the beer-spluttering surprise of a couple of stray males behind me. By the time they've worked out that JD is actually female, she's already satirising their reactions by singing the (wo)mantra "Are you a girl, or are you a guy?" through a loudhailer.

Hanna's voice has altered from a shrill banshee shriek to a pop-friendly bubblegum squeal, and her own lyrics have moved on from the simplistic sloganeering of the Bikini Kill days. Unreconstructed anti-oppression rants like "FYR" (Fifty Years of Ridicule) are offset by the more complex tracks like "What's Yr Take On Cassavetes?", in which she and Fateman tackle the problematic dilemma of how to judge a great artist with unpleasant politics, taking it in turns to yell accolades and accusations: it's "misogynist!" vs "genius!", "alcoholic!" vs "messiah!".

Eclecticism, by definition, is inclusive. So who are Le Tigre for? Tonight, glancing at the crowd, the crew and the fanzines, a passing anthropologist might conclude that this was music by and for dykes, but if the playground skipping rope chant of "Hot Topic" or the barbed wire bassline of "Deceptacon" aren't meant for me, I don't care, I'm taking them home with me. Le Tigre got the beat.

s.price@independent.co.uk

The Breeders: Mean Fiddler, London W1 (020 7434 9592), tonight