Peaches: Fatherfucker

Peaches toggles between two extremes of personality: cartoonishly bawdy, and slightly less cartoonishly bawdy. She sprang up on the electro scene in 2000 with songs like "Fuck The Pain Away" and "Diddle My Skittle," and made herself a formidable presence with live shows that feature lots of diddles and next to no candy coating. Peaches is brash, raw, and antagonistic, a message she reiterates with Fatherfucker's opening screeds: "I don't give a fuck" and "I don't give a shit." She repeats both close to 30 times, and even when the words change, the sentiment doesn't. Whether she's playing a party-starting feminist barker or the pissed-off punk that Pink talks about being, Peaches screams and growls over banging electro rubbed down to its barest essence. Guitars and live drum sounds give Fatherfucker a more rock-minded roar than that of her debut The Teaches Of Peaches, but even its most flailing outflows fall into a mechanical strut. A few highlights make good on Peaches' pitch: the Iggy Pop duet "Kick It" courses through call-and-response odes to self-cutting and Berlin (with Pop admitting "I don't look too good in pink"), and the overdose song "Operate" points toward a moody slink Peaches would be smart to mine. But nearly all of Fatherfucker falls back into ostensibly bracing anthems that sound plain stupid in such abundance. Guess what "Shake Yer Dix" is about The same goes for "I'm The Kinda." And "Stuff Me Up," which marks a nadir with repeated calls to "eat a cookie, eat a big dick every day." Sunk deep into Fatherfucker's sloshing well of fluids and waste, it sounds like a weird sort of autistic tic, a command more brainless than brazen. It wouldn't matter as much if Peaches didn't sound so ready to evolve on the static-y screamer "Rock 'N' Roll" and the surprisingly sensual "The Inch," but evolution seems like a remote concern to an album glad to sink below even the lowest expectations.