Her fourth release under the moniker of Peaches, the album opens ominously with ‘Serpentine’. Nisker displaying her priority for rhyme over reason, spitting out spunky couplets that sacrifice making sense for being sensory (“Fuck maturity got a big bad brain like a champagne stain as I yank your chain’). The hushed urgency she delivers these nuggets with does render the song enjoyable, but often it sounds too much like a Mighty Boosh parody of itself as the lazily repetitive and tuneless excuse for a hook begins to grate. By the second track, Soulwax produced ‘Talk To Me’, you are ready to forgive her though. This first single, co-wrote by Gonzales (sometime writing partner of Feist), is a screaming, strutting monument of a Peaches song. It’s Suzi Quatro turned techno, Ike & Tina’s Nutbush City Limits given an electro clash makeover, and it orders you to listen as much as the lyrics implore otherwise.
While the rest of the album fails to hold on to the authority exhibited by this track, there are a few gems between the Peaches-by-numbers filler. ‘I Feel Cream’ seems every inch the 21st century update of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, the sweetly soaring chorus underpinned by stilted synth has the drum machine set unshakeably to ‘disco’, with a brief injection of her white girl rap to sustain interest in the bridge. ‘Billionaire’ is a song which sees the ex-schoolteacher busting rhymes again, this time about manginas and salty diets. She adopts a sort of ghetto slur which amounts to her sounding as if she rapping through a mouth guard, but the chorus of “Fuck you like a billionaire” is hard to fault.
Having turned forty, it might be telling that there is nothing so brash as ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ on show. You may miss the potty mouth punk that jolted you into listening as the album loses momentum, but the confidence of this release proves Nisker is under no threat of losing her crown for now.