Rockin' Our Turntable: Peaches

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on May 20, 2009 4:20PM

When the lead single off your debut is called "Fuck The Pain Away" you tend to a) quickly pigeonhole your philosophical approach to your music and b) provide a pretty high bar to leap over if you want to top yourself in terms of sexual brashness. When you're Peaches, you accomplish both by providing ever more elaborate stage shows with varying degrees of clothing involved while simultaneously producing throbbing albums teeming with confident sexuality that makes something like Mick Jagger's preening look positively neutered.

At the same time those same albums have been faced with a growing problem: the message remains strong but the music has stagnated as it adheres too closely to its electro-clubland roots. We have no problem with that style of music, but we feel Peaches has been treading water in that slowly stagnating sea when she should have been looking ways to make waves.

I Feel Cream, the latest disc from Peaches, opens with "Serpentine" a minimal bass-driven that would seem to imply this album will also fall along familiar musical ground, but it turns out it's merely a palate cleanser making way for the multi-tiered dance party to follow. The diva holler of "Talk To Me," the bubbling tender (?!) synth pop of "Lose You," the Eastern European cheese of "I Feel Cream"; all of these songs mark relatively new ground for Peaches, and it's a welcome change.

The signature bravado and self-assured stance is still in full effect here, but Peaches finally seems at least equally interested in hanging her observations on top of newly varied song structures that leap beyond her days of surfing over common denominator beats. In the past this minimal approach allowed her to amplify the shock level of some of her lyrics, but I Feel Cream feels far richer as Peaches shows a new confidence by allowing most of the music backing her tracks to be at least as entertaining as her words.

MP3: Peaches "Talk To Me"

Peaches plays with Drums Of Death and Evil Beaver at Metro, 3730 N Clark, Friday, May 22, 9 p.m., $25, 18+