I expected Peaches to be pretty trashy. I didn't quite expect just how spectacularly and gloriously trashy she would be during her performance at the Valarium last night. It was a hour-long celebration of appetite--a marked improvement over the warmed-over synth-rock of opening act M.E.N., and, I think, a more fully formed political statement than the Le Tigre spin-off's sloganeering. Maybe "Shake Yer Dix" and "Lovertits" aren't part of the standard vocabulary of political discourse, but as a statement of dancefloor hedonism and pop indulgence, they beat cardboard signs reading "Silence=Death." (I agree with the sentiment, and it's an important message, but you're preaching to the choir here. And who wants to dance to that, anyway?)
The rock dynamics--the guitars and the encore, especially, and closing the set with the crowd-pleasing "F--k the Pain Away"--were a little disappointing, but Peaches and her band worked them well. She ruled the stage from the moment she appeared, wearing a rubber or maybe latex cartoon porcupine suit and a wrestling mask. By the end of the set she was down to a flesh-colored nylon bodystocking. She crowd-surfed, spewed a bottle of champagne over the audience, and played something that looked like either a fluorescent light bulb or a lightsaber.
When I was a kid, my mom was terrified of rock concerts, I think mostly in response to KISS and the stampede at the Who's 1979 concert in Cincinnati. I had vague ideas about the debauchery that happened at concerts; last night was about as close as I've ever gotten to actually seeing what I thought a rock concert was like when I was 10.
The rock dynamics--the guitars and the encore, especially, and closing the set with the crowd-pleasing "F--k the Pain Away"--were a little disappointing, but Peaches and her band worked them well. She ruled the stage from the moment she appeared, wearing a rubber or maybe latex cartoon porcupine suit and a wrestling mask. By the end of the set she was down to a flesh-colored nylon bodystocking. She crowd-surfed, spewed a bottle of champagne over the audience, and played something that looked like either a fluorescent light bulb or a lightsaber.
When I was a kid, my mom was terrified of rock concerts, I think mostly in response to KISS and the stampede at the Who's 1979 concert in Cincinnati. I had vague ideas about the debauchery that happened at concerts; last night was about as close as I've ever gotten to actually seeing what I thought a rock concert was like when I was 10.
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