Peaches has a one-track mind. Every one of her songs is about sex: straight, gay, bi, all-purpose. At Irving Plaza on Saturday night, she started her set in a gold lamé leotard and headdress — vaguely Cleopatra-ish — and ended up in a black bikini, collar and wrist cuffs. She did a little bump-and-grind and a lot of strutting. Most of her lyrics can’t be quoted in this family newspaper.
Peaches, who has gone from electro to rock, at Irving Plaza on Saturday.
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But her act isn’t exactly about enticement or desire. It’s about bravado and the spectacle of a woman who’s willing to be as raunchy as a man.
For her debut album in 2000, “The Teaches of Peaches,” and through years of touring, Peaches backed herself up with rudimentary drum machines and samples. The stark, mechanized sound harked back to early-1980’s electro and old-school hip-hop, and Peaches’s savvy breakthrough song, which posited sex as a painkiller, gave club disc jockeys something to toy with.
Concept aside, on sheer musical terms Peaches was no competition for equally explicit, far more articulate and rhythmically savvy rappers like Lil’ Kim, or dancehall toasters like Lady Saw. (Peaches, however, appreciates homosexuality, while hip-hop and reggae rhymers often revile it.) Wisely, Peaches picked up another 1980’s idea: adding power chords to the drum-machine beat, à la Run-D.M.C. Lately she has been shifting from raps, which take a lot of writing and rhyming, to hard-rock songs that allow for far more repetition; luckily, Peaches can sing, wailing like Joan Jett, and now she occasionally plays guitar. (Peaches, a Canadian whose real name is Merrill Nisker, used to be a music teacher.)
On her new album Peaches is backed by additional musicians (including Ms. Jett), and onstage she now leads a four-woman band. At the end of the set, they wore matching jackets that announced them as “Peaches and the Herms.”
The musical upgrade, as Peaches called it, puts more punch and variety in her music and frees her for more showmanship. At Irving Plaza she performed onstage, on a speaker cabinet, in the balcony and on the dance floor. The band alternated guitar-charged rockers and electro songs with deep, throbbing bass lines; an inflatable phallus loomed behind them. Singing and rapping, Peaches delivered demands, exhortations, taunts and step-by-step instructions on what to shake or stroke.
Compared with Ms. Jett, Madonna or Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Peaches is less an object of desire than a pep-rally yell leader; her raps often have the rhythms of football cheers. Her material is closer to a checklist than to a fantasy, and her audience finds it amusing, not shocking. It’s one big, happy conceptual in-joke, and it’s more than entertaining enough for a one-night stand.
With Peaches to represent female sexuality unleashed, the Eagles of Death Metal, sharing the bill, were the counterbalance: the return of guitar-wielding rock machismo. Their riffs echoed the Rolling Stones and AC/DC, with Josh Homme (who leads Queens of the Stone Age) pounding the drums behind Jesse Hughes, the mustachioed lead singer, who ostentatiously combed back his hair and readjusted his sunglasses between songs. The band has zero subtext and all the swagger it needs.
