Live Review: Peaches, Black Cracker, Habits

Peaches tours Australia a lot, but no matter how many times she's come out here, the chance to witness her show inspires a giddy enthusiasm that becomes infectious pretty quickly. Even openers Habits, who veer towards the maudlin side of electronic music, are greeted with large cheers and a room full of smiles when they play their set.

Tonight's headliner has a pretty solid track record of picking excellent, genre-defying support acts on her Australian tours, and main support Black Cracker continues that legacy. The Berlin-based artist combines hip hop lyricism with the kind of beats that tonight's very excitable crowd want to hear. These people want to dance, and any excuse to do so before the main attraction will do just nicely.

Peaches is fucking fearless: who else are you going to see climbing over the crowd in an oversized pink merkin? Despite the frequency of her Australian visits, the crowd is enthralled with everything the Canadian electroclash diva has to offer. Beyond the spectacle of the show (which feels in equal parts like a low budget, punk rock version of a Madonna stadium show and a Rammstein concert sans the stifling heteronormativity), Peaches has material that gets everybody moving. Whether it's her pop hits like Talk To Me or the most spiteful break-up song since Shellac's Prayer To God - Free Drink Ticket - she manages to communicate the raw emotion behind every cut she plays. The crowd is right with her no matter she's trying to say. It helps that her latest album Rub might be her strongest since The Teaches Of Peaches. It starts when she's rolling around atop the crowd in a giant inflatable penis asking, "Whose jizz is this?" Then, she's formed a human centipede of pantomime anilingus with back-up dancers who have co-opted the black metal aesthetic but with, ya'know, more g-strings. Nothing is taboo or off limits and after every song the crowd is applauding like they're trying desperately to keep this incredible party going. When she leaves the stage after a particularly raucous rendition of Fuck The Pain Away, her minions don't simply just cheer for her return, they keep dancing as though the star of the evening has no choice but to keep the fun going. Even after she closes with a jubilant rendition of Light In Places, where the only stage lighting is coming from the crotches of her and her back-up dancers, the crowd is jumping like there's going to be several more hours of the Peach. She's just that goddamn sweet.