They call it electroclash, lumping together Miss Kittin And The Hacker, Ladytron, Linda Lamb, Fischerspooner and Adult., citing the stripped down minimalist sound and the robotic, repetitive drums. Slip in a vocoder, set the whole thing at a fashion party in a warehouse with a couple of six inch lines of coke, and you've got it. That's electroclash. Most electroclash bands hate the name, especially people like Peaches who predate the whole electroclash label, but that's beside the point. Apparently.
Peaches isn't like that, though. Ordinarily known as Merrill Nisker, Peaches is kitted out with short black hair, dark glasses, sleazy-looking hot pants and enough fishnet to deplete the entire fishing stock of a fair-sized lake. She might look like Chicks On Speed, and her music might be minimal, repetitive and stripped down, but it's not electroclash. Sure, it sounds like electroclash, but it's doesn't quite fit in, somehow...
Anthems like Fuck The Pain Away, Diddle My Skittle and Lovertits best illustrate the sleaze and vulgarity of Peaches' debut CD, the intriguingly named Teaches Of Peaches. To properly follow her advice you'd need an oversized cleavage, a healthy disregard for monogamy and at least one sex toy, but you can have just as much fun listening to her dry, rap-styled delivery, intoned with vicious incisiveness over a pulsing backdrop of synthesized distortion.
Peaches' live shows are simplicity itself, relying more on skin than technology and sounding all the better for it. Her equipment is as minimal as her music, and wires straight into the sound system, allowing Peaches maximum time to rub her tits in the audience's face and have herself passed over the adoring crowd. Anywhere but Toronto is good at this, according to the girl herself ("Fucking typical conservative Toronto. Anywhere else they would have passed me all the way to the back."). Nowadays, Berlin's the best place to find her, Berlin being the very place where Merrill Nisker, in a Bowie-to-Stardust type transformation, metamorphosed into the filthier-than-Miss-Kittin audience tease, somehow managing to get the boys hard and the girls wet at the same time.
2003 sees Peaches' second album, the demurely titled Fatherfucker, complete with bizarrely-bearded Peaches gazing out of the front cover. Check out the downloadable single from her website - pay for the mp3 and it's yours to keep, listen to and burn. A provocative move in today's peer-to-peer piracy explosion.
Three years later, and 2006 provides a release for Impeach My Bush. More of the same, but still as appealing. Expect to see more of Peaches. Probably literally; those shorts don't cover up much, and the crotch gallery on her website doesn't exactly come across as prudish.
Avalyn informs me that Pink's latest album features Peaches as a guest vocalist, delivering her usual style over the chorus of the track Oh My God. | 
