Merrill “Peaches” Nisker may now be 40, but her vagina and basslines still snap back like rubber. Don’t expect any slippery-dick twenty- or thirtysomething music journo to pass up the chance to publicly light every candle on her birthday cake, but on I Feel Cream, her fourth album under the name of a juicy fruit, she admits that above those spreading thighs are hips plenty wide. Which is why it’s both heartening and terrifying that her sexual aggression has apparently paced with her advancing age.
“Never mind my age/It’s like I’m breaking out of a cage,” Peaches moans on “Show Stopper.” I mean, sweet merciful pud, she compares herself to Mae “Melons” West in “Mommy Complex.” (Can you think of any other woman who, in her 80s, made a movie in which she wears out an entire Olympic gymnastics team?) As the electroclash Mrs. Robinson commands, your feigned indifference to her years is unacceptable, but you wouldn’t have even asked if she wasn’t so forthright in telling, since the musical thrust of her new set of songs is as muscular as the claptraps and Venus Flytraps of her dark novelty hit “Fuck the Pain Away.”
Having recruited songwriter Gonzales and producers Digitalism and Simian Mobile Disco, I Feel Cream is, as the title insinuates, a jaundiced nod to Donna Summer, but never more than just a nod. The leadoff single, “Take Me Out,” sounds nothing like “Love to Fuck You Baby.” It’s a hard-rocking, guitar-abusing assault howled from the point of view of a woman receiving disappointing, wordless head, grabbing her partner’s face and screaming “Stop pretending that the problem’s mine!” (In comparison, the angriest vocals Summer ever allowed herself to commit to wax was yanked out of her pipes by Barbra Streisand.)
“Seems you got a little bit more than you asked for,” Peaches accuses in “More,” a reverberating, jackhammering demon. I’ll say. Her vitriol has the comforting reliability of the maternal, but she really dilates her orifices on the massive, unexpectedly gorgeous title track. Against the warm, revving bassline and Chicago house drum machine, Peaches unleashes an airy, almost lilting soprano line worthy of Tracey Thorn, floating helium-hearted remarks like, “Your skin so smooth it sets the mood.” Okay, maybe age has softened Peaches a tad, but if “I Feel Cream” is the result, it sounds more compelling and radical than any number of new iterations of “sucking on my titties.”
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