David Iversen
Audio By Carbonatix
Time has not softened Peaches.
The Berlin-based artist, born Merrill Nisker, made her long-awaited return to American stages Tuesday night at Walter Studios in Phoenix, one stop on her current U.S. tour supporting “No Lube So Rude,” her first album in more than a decade. The show delivered a theatrical, boundary-dissolving set to a crowd that had been waiting, in some cases, 17 years, for this moment.
The audience showed their age, many of them now in their 30s and 40s, veterans of the early-aughts electro-punk era that made Peaches a cult icon. Her 2006 album “Impeach My Bush” was her commercial apex, full of aggressively playful, sex-drenched anthems like “Tent in your Pants” and “Boys Wanna Be Her.”
David Iversen
This was not a nostalgia tour.
Peaches emerged draped first in prosthetic breasts and fur, her face obscured, opening with “Hanging Titties” to set the tone immediately. The set was a meditation on the female body and the audacity of aging. Costume changes came frequently. At one point she stripped to a leotard and declared “Trans rights now,” drawing thunderous applause from the progressive Phoenix crowd.
Her two dancers, one male, one female, were costumed in ways that deliberately obscured gender, their bodies becoming extensions of the show’s central thesis.
Only the male dancer’s beard gave him away, and even that felt like a conscious concession rather than an oversight.
The makeup streaked down Peaches’ face as if erosion itself were part of the choreography. A silver grill caught the stage lights. At the show’s most audacious moment, she climbed into what can only be described as a giant prolapsed anatomy costume, equal parts performance art and crowd-surfing safety net, and walked across outstretched hands into the audience, performing several songs from atop the sound booth before making her way back through the crowd.
David Iversen
Everything felt intentional, the work of an artist who has spent years thinking carefully about what she wanted to say and exactly how grotesque and gorgeous she wanted it to look saying it.
If her early albums were about sex and provocation, she has said recently that she is now in her “prolapse era,” reckoning with aging on her own terms, refusing to do it quietly or flatteringly. Tuesday night in Phoenix, that manifesto was fully, viscerally alive.
The energy was relentless.
Peaches climbed stage pieces, crowd-walked, and performed several songs from atop the sound booth. It took perhaps 20 minutes to fully win the room, but well before the three encores, including an inevitable, rapturous “Fuck the Pain Away,” the crowd was completely hers.
She closed with a Barbra Streisand cover.
Only Peaches.
