Peaches Gets Down and Dirty in Atlanta

Posted on Nov 10th 2009 11:00AM by Justin Jacobs
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While Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips walks over his crowds in a giant inflatable ball, Peaches does it without one. On Monday, the genre and gender-bending singer took her wild stage show to Atlanta's Center Stage, where the crowd used each of her not-so-subtle sexual innuendos as cues to stir the floor into a frenetic dance party while Peaches took turns writhing onstage, crowd surfing/groping and swinging from the club's low ceiling and exposed pipes.

Oh, and there was music, too. Tons of it, with the German backing band Sweet Machine blasting out pulsing electro-punk beats over which Peaches -- born Merrill Beth Nisker -- shredded her vocal chords with all manners of sexually charged, don't-play-this-for-the-parents lyrics.

Anyone familiar with Peaches' shtick should expect that a show will be equal parts performance art and musical expression; she's one of the few out-there artists who've got the balance down. She took the stage wearing what looked like a porcupine costume with phallic quills, sporting a curly-haired Mohawk. She changed outfits no fewer than five times throughout the set, including a flesh-colored unitard with fake breasts and a purple top that looked like the Michelin Man's torso.

The set drew mainly from Peaches latest electro-clash ode to casual sex, 'I Feel Cream,' her fullest-sounding yet and the album's powerful bangers, the shrieking 'Talk to Me' and the shadowy bass fuzz of 'More,' begged the audience to leave any inhibitions -- and most of their clothing -- behind.

"So this is sexy," said a sweat-drenched Peaches in one of her few between-song banters. "Can it get sexier? Of course it can. Shirts. Come. Off."

Unsurprisingly, she got what she asked for -- in seconds, a hundred shirts were swinging around people's heads or flying towards the stage. One of them, showing pictures of Georgia's favorite fruit, found its way into Peaches' hands.

"This is my state!" she said holding up the shirt. "This is the peach state!"

The biggest crowd response came from Peaches trademark "F--- the Pain Away," her bedroom-created ode to forgetting about your troubles. When a show is this wild, animalistic, hot and sweaty, that's not so hard to do.