When her incendiary album “The Teaches of Peaches” debuted in 2000, Peaches easily could have remained a fringe cultural footnote.
She deals in a trashy, in-your-face sort of humor we’re used to seeing from Howard Stern. Her persona swings between gender-bending and overtly political. She often performs only in her underwear and heavy makeup, a throwback to the sleazy early ’80s.
And really, wasn’t electroclash so five years ago?
But the Canadian-born Peaches (a.k.a. 38-year-old Merrill Nisker) tapped into a weird sort of musical energy that straddled hip-hop, dance, metal and indie rock. She writes and programs almost all her own music. Her unapologetic character and raucous live sets constantly earn her
new fans, even when she’s opening
for a stadium-sized band like Nine Inch Nails.
“It’s actually quite amazing to see people singing along at the shows,” Peaches said earlier this week from a tour stop in California. “A lot of the core Nine Inch Nails fans come to every show and they’re singing along. I’ve also been crowd surfing on this audience and nobody dropped me.”
When Peaches visits the Gothic Theatre Saturday night with Eagles of Death Metal, she’ll be the headliner, touting songs from her new album, “ImPeach My Bush.” The disc, released Tuesday, features a number of song titles and lyrics that cannot be printed in a family-friendly publication.
“Whenever I switch around words it puts a spin on it,” she said, noting she doesn’t see much difference between sex and politics. “I find them all really connected. I want to question power roles and authority, and I think sex is one of the main weapons of both politics and religion.”
Peaches’ boldness (she’s pictured wearing a full beard on her last album cover) and spare, weirdly addictive songs have earned her spots on soundtracks to films like “Lost in Translation” and “Mean Girls.” Her gallery of admirers includes Iggy Pop and Joan Jett, both of whom she has collaborated with on her albums. Her rapport with Jett, in fact, was almost immediate when they first met.
“She happened to be in town so she called me and asked what I was doing,” Peaches said. “She wanted to come and hang out in the studio, so it just kind of happened.”
Collaboration is one of Peaches’ strengths. Her new album alone features guest spots from Jett, Josh Homme, Feist, Beth Ditto (The Gossip) and Samantha Maloney (Hole, Mötley Crüe). It makes for a fuller-sounding affair as she moves away from the skeletal arrangements of her previous two discs, which relied almost solely on her MC505 synthesizer.
She also feels her songs translate better into a live setting than before, when she relied on mostly pre-recorded tracks. Her new “all-girl onslaught” features Maloney on drums, Radio Sloan (from Courtney Love’s band) on guitar and J.D. Samson (Le Tigre) on keytar and sequencing.
“It was obvious when I made this album that it was going to be hard to pull off the backing tracks,” she said. “Now that I’ve established everything I do, it’s like, ‘Let’s start the revolution and bring everybody on.”‘
The new album may reach a bit wider than before, but it’s still the same old Peaches. Tracks like “Boys Wanna Be Her” combine the sing-along hooks of an ’80s new wave anthem with compressed beats and punchy riffs. Peaches’ laconic, sexually charged vocals convey an easy confidence that could turn explosive at any moment.
Peaches, who lives in Berlin, vehemently asserts she’s not doing anything drastically different from before.
“You do something really obvious like call the title of your album that (“ImPeach My Bush”) and all of a sudden now I’m political in every way,” she said. “But it’s exactly the same.”
Maybe, but a lot more people are paying attention now.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
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Peaches
ELECTROCLASH|Gothic Theatre, 3263 S. Broadway; 8 p.m. Saturday|$20|with the Eagles of Death Metal; TicketWeb
