Peaches I Feel Cream

Every once in a while, Peaches fandom is forced to remind itself that behind the flashy guise of their sex goddess is a middle-aged, Canadian-born former elementary school teacher named Merrill Nisker. Such is the power of musical reinvention, where a seemingly mild-mannered educator can become the swaggering, swearing she-wolf of electroclash lore. For Peaches, sex is both the palette and the joke; a canvas to front all of her hatred, ego-fluffing, mania, and posturing, yet also a pin cushion to be skewered mercilessly. I Feel Cream, the follow-up to 2006's Impeach My Bush, is no different in its approach. Neither evolution nor reinvention, the album is a second jab to the face - Peaches' harsh reminder that she's as nasty and tough a prizefighter at age forty as she was in her twenties.

Of course, Peaches is nothing if not self-aware. "Never mind my age," she coos early on, squashing the questions already dropping from the eager lips of ageist critics. Still, her riskiness has never been exclusively kept in frank, purposefully-immature dealings with aggression (sexual or otherwise), but rather in the tendency to let sound fall where it may. Content to be threadbare and sporadic, Cream almost dares listeners to enjoy the black holes nesting between beats and strikes. The monotone repetitions and stark productions remain novel as music arises out of non-musical decisions, such as the snap of a digital stick or one of Peaches' breathy huffs. What results is an album that is harshly buzzing and yet highly seductive, a raw minimalism that echoes as if it's being beat from some ancient cave with bone-crafted tools. Yet the primitive sounds come in sawing synths and digitized splashes, keeping the blitz disciplined and surgical.

Peaches excels at such reversals, and the lyrical content is no different. Whereas many artists would let a dark underbelly sit beneath the brighter veneer, Peaches prefers her brutality upfront and bolstered by a layer of sly, subtle humor.  Like all that goes before it, I Feel Cream is a boiling thunder cloud with a silver lining - a kick to the groin followed by a knowing wink. As such, the album is often saved by a thick lather of often-ridiculous, always-raunchy humor. Who else but Peaches could effectively fit Michael Jackson references and the phrase "diamond in the muff" into Trick or Treat, a story of glamorized prostitution? Or the ironic but purposefully-clunky Serpentine, where Peaches guides us through her recent exploits without rising above a bare whisper?   

Yet for an album supposedly built on brash charm, Cream contains few memorable vices. Lose You is Peaches as ice queen, offering crushed keys and delicate crooning; Billionaire is a second take on Beck's Hollywood Freaks, complete with the clipped, lisp-plagued rhyming and strut of nonsensical imagery. Songs are often less outrageous than first impressions would indicate: the plateaued track More isn't the decadent romp many listeners would expect it to be, relying on the steady drone of wet-but-restrained lightning snaps. 

Still, the album's suffering libido is on no account of its creator, who is as virile and punchy as ever in her role as libertine prankster. Rather, Cream is a victim of the times, no more than a mere face in a pop culture marketplace crowded with sexual aggrandizing and salacious controversy.The kind of antics Peaches has built her career on - pushing and pulling at the accepted boundaries, tongue-in-cheek shock value - are now a common rite of passage for artists pushing their edgy shtick. Thus, when the mellow growl wears and the thinly-veiled sex farce tires, I Feel Cream exists as no more than a baby-step towards artistic maturity, and one that may be entirely too little, too late.