Reviewed onFriday December 9 (photo by Ashley Mar)
In perhaps the queerest and most female-empowering set to ever grace the Metro stage, electronic debauchery was in full swing on Friday as Peaches utterly destroyed the joint.
Habits began the night with their signature “sad goth party jams”, but the party was in short supply. Their combo of pulsing bass and grotesquely distorted vox got a few bodies gyrating, but it wasn’t until Black Cracker made moves on the entire front row that the floor started giving way.
Backed by ingenious, cheeky twin-screen projections of his own design, Cracker (Berlin-based Ellison Renee Glenn) demanded of the crowd the same ecstatic response he’s used to in German raves, and set the tone for the lead act with a sexually charged set of oddcore bangers. He came as he was, and we want what he is.
It’s been a year since last we saw Peaches in Oz, and she’s lost none of her transgressive yonic fury despite 15 years of spreading the Teaches. She gifted an ecstatic, mostly shirtless crowd with two hours of utter filth, including her latest album Rub in full.
Emerging in a furry pubic yeti suit and detailed vagina hat, she opened with female circle-jerk anthem ‘Rub’ and immediately dominated the space. Peaches is a one-woman mardi gras: three songs in, she was flanked by dancers dressed as full-body front bottoms; a song later, she was topless and nipple-stickered, near-naked crowd-surfing.
What are the words to explain the giant, inflatable cock thrust into the crowd, which Peaches climbed inside? Or the strobing crotch disco that accompanied set closer ‘Light In Places’? Or the simulated three-way anilingus-fest preceding ‘Fuck The Pain Away’? How else do you describe a gig in which a bondage-clad male dancer in a bikini spits full in your face, and you fucking love it?
Peaches is gratuity embodied, a pornographic priestess at the height of her pussy powers, spraying booty-shakin’ synth beats like electronic cumshots into the faces of ecstatic revellers. She was the pill this city’s dying nightlife desperately needed. Drenched in champagne, sweat and who knows what else, we emerged into the night like Berlin ravers after a three-day binge, shaking with the electrifying sensation of total gratification.
The girls wanna be her, the boys wanna be her. No, we don’t wanna be her. We just want her to dominate us all over again.
