Peaches – Audiofemme

Deap Vally Invite Creative Collaborators Into Their Rock ‘N’ Roll Marriage

Photo Credit: Ericka Clevenger/Kelsey Hart

The musical marriage between Lindsey Troy and Julie Edward began a decade ago when they committed their respective rock ‘n’ roll talents to Deap Vally. Their long friendship and professional partnership has been creatively fertile in the last two years, culminating in the release of their third album, Marriage, released November 19 via Cooking Vinyl. It follows two EPs released earlier this year: in February, they dropped the Digital Dream EP and in June, American Cockroach.

Both the EPs and Marriage are the products of the “collaboration series” the duo began after releasing their second album Femejism in 2016, which was produced by Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs notoriety.

“After Femejism came out, we did quite a bit of touring in the US,” says Troy. “We were on the road a lot, and then, once we finally got time to do some more writing, we were trying to figure out how to shake up the writing process and make it exciting for us again, because we’d spent so much one-on-one time with each other.”

Reaching out to potential collaborators – something that happens often in EDM and hip-hop, but not so much in the rock ‘n’ roll world – proved to do just that. One of their first acts they got in touch with was The Flaming Lips, with some unexpected results.

“That ended up turning into a full record!” says Troy. “We released that first, but originally that was meant to be a song as part of our collaboration series.” The Deap Lips album, a scuzzy, hazy-glam, psyched-out antidote to the pandemic blues, whet their appetites for more creative partnerships. The possibilities open to them as they expanded beyond their two-piece lineup felt suddenly real and immediate, as evidenced by the bleepy, trippy, Wayne Coyne-flavoured track “The Pusher.”

“The beauty of collaborating is that you can always take something new away from witnessing and participating in someone else’s approach,” says Edwards. “Although we had many of our collaborations already in progress when we wrote with the Lips, it was inspiring to see their seamless blend of practical work ethic with spontaneous inspiration. Definitely recording at the Flaming Lips studio in Oklahoma was a true highlight so far.”

“So far” refers to the ten years since Edwards and Troy formed Deap Vally in 2011. When they met in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, Edwards had been a vocalist, drummer, and keyboardist for LA-band The Pity Party alongside Marc Smollin since 2005, which toured and released EPs until 2012. Meanwhile, San Diego-born singer-guitarist Troy had (child-prodigy style) teamed up with her sister Anna to form The Troys, recording their debut album for Elektra Records in 2002 but never releasing it (Lindsey was just 15 at the time, and Elektra closed shop soon afterwards). The sisters released their solo projects in 2006: Anna’s Ain’t No Man LP; Lindsey’s Bruises EP months later. Lindsey had been doing her own solo thing until meeting Edwards, in the last place you’d expect given their hard-hitting sound.

“Lindsey actually came into my shop, The Little Knittery, and I taught her how to crochet and knit, and that’s how we met,” says Edwards. “At this point, there’s pretty much no downtime to make stuff, but we used to knit compulsively on the road and sell our handknits at shows.”

They shared more in common than a love of crochet. The two women spoke the same language when it came to rock, bonding over a love of Led Zeppelin.

Their own raw, noodling, punk-garage-blues rock relies purely on guitar, drums and frank, feminist lyrics delivered in a full-throated holler. The duo signed to Island Records in 2012 on the strength of their first single, “Gonna Make My Own Money;” the raucous, frenetic drums teamed with fuzzy, savage guitar riffs and a Karen O-style guttural-yet-melodic moan was undeniably a anthemic feminist cry in the spirit of Bikini Kill, L7 and Babes In Toyland. It would appear on their 2013 EP Get Deap! alongside three additional tracks that Spin declared “a burst of self-reliant aggression.”

“It’s unapologetic, heavy and groovy,” the duo stated in their trailer for the EP, in which the furious, fabulous “End Of The World” soundtracks footage of Troy and Edwards looking suitably rock ‘n’ roll with their big hair, swigging hard liquor straight from the bottle and ferociously swinging their instruments about on stage. That was but a sampling of the 11-track debut to come: Sistrionix, recorded in LA with producer Lars Stalfors of The Mars Volta, dropped in June of that same year. With instant acclaim came festival spots at Latitude, Leeds and Reading Festivals in the UK, and tours with The Vaccines, Muse, Wolf Mother, Marilyn Manson and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The same album spawned one of my favourite Deap Valley bangers: “Baby I Call Hell,” a hot, hollering, anthemic rock beast in which Troy demands of her lover, “Are you gonna please me, like you swore you would, or is it just to tease me? Better treat this woman good!”

Femejism followed in 2016, and 2017 saw the duo touring with Blondie and Garbage on the Rage and Rapture Tour. But their marriage was feeling frayed at the edges and the creative spark had been dulled by domestic demands (both Troy and Edwards have very young children). The thrill of releasing music as Deap Lips only confirmed that collaborations seemed to reignite the muse, and Marriage showcases that renewed passion.

<a href="https://deapvally.bandcamp.com/album/marriage">Marriage by Deap Vally</a>

“High Horse” features KT Tunstall and Peaches. “She’s brilliant as fuck, bold, funny, and completely down to Earth,” says Edwards of Peaches. “She’s a blessing to humankind, truly.”

Eagles of Death Metal bassist Jennie Vee is a primal force on “I Like Crime.”

“A few years ago, we played a really great rock festival called Aftershock…one of the bands playing was Eagles of Death Metal,” recalls Troy. “I’m a huge fan of Eagles of Death Metal – they’re such a tasty, feel-good, unique, authentic rock ’n’ roll band. We were watching them side stage and Julie and I were like, ‘Holy crap! Who is this woman?’ We didn’t know they had a female bass player… she’s incredible, she had such good stage presence, she looked so cool. We were blown away.”

The mutual love affair resulted in studio time in LA, with “I Like Crime” completed in three days.

On “Look Away,” the dreamy, sadly romantic Warpaint vibe is unmistakable thanks to jennylee. It’s a bittersweet, ’80s-style ballad in which the refrain “This is heart, this is heart, this is heartache” smarts with the raw, hopeless lonely fog of a breakup.

“We booked a day at the Cave Studio in LA with engineer/producer Josiah Mazzaschi and we went in with jennylee, and basically the way we started writing together was just with spontaneous jamming in the live room that Josiah recorded,” recounts Edwards. “We jammed out a few different spontaneous ideas that were just springing up and then took a break to listen to what we came up with. Listening to jams can be painful and funny, and we embraced that. Then we picked which jam we all agreed was our favorite, and we started to build on that. We got most of the structure and ideas done in a day, and then did two more days to finish the song. It was really fun and easy. The whole point was not to overthink it and to surrender to the song that was forming, rather try to control the outcome.” Spontaneity and surrender: the perfect recipe for a rock ‘n’ roll marriage likely to go the distance another ten, if not twenty, years.

Follow Deap Vally on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Twenty Years of Lessons From The Teaches of Peaches

Peaches circa 2002. Photo Credit: Hadley Hudson

Some of you may remember that first time you heard Peaches. Maybe it was on the dance floor near the start of the new century. Maybe you were taken aback at first by the sound, so bare and raw in comparison to the electronic music of the decade that had only recently ended. Still, it was funky, so you kept dancing.

Then the first line hit you: “Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me…” You weren’t shocked because you had been a ’90s teen and you had certainly heard far more explicit lyrics by the time you got to high school. Whoever this singer was, though, she was going somewhere different. You caught the references to Blondie and Chrissie Hynde and you smiled. The third time that one verse repeats, you were singing along without realizing it. “Callin’ me, all the time, like Blondie/Check out my Chrissie behind.”

Then, all of a sudden, this singer that you’ve never heard before blurted out something unexpected. “Fuck the pain away. Fuck the pain away.” She repeated this line almost without emotion as the beat kicked your ass and your hair flew as if you’ve danced to this song 1000 times before.

It was twenty years ago (yes, really) that Peaches unleashed her breakthrough album, The Teaches of Peaches, and the song that would remain her calling card, “Fuck the Pain Away.” The album was a slow burn. Although The Teaches of Peaches was released through the German record label Kitty-Yo on September 5, 2000, those who would become her fans likely heard it first somewhere between that fall and 2002, the year that British indie XL Recordings reissued it.

In the 1990s, Canadian musician Merrill Nisker had played around in rock-oriented bands. She first fell for synths during a jam session that would result in the short-lived project, The Shit, which she has, in multiple interviews, credited as the beginning of her evolution into the artist we now know as Peaches. After The Shit ended, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “It made me think a lot about what I wanted out of life,” she recalls in The Guardian podcast The Start. That included seriously pursuing her musical ambitions. Peaches bought a synth and began working on her solo music.

The Teaches of Peaches marked both an end and a beginning. It was an album whose existence was made known through 20th century promotional channels that would soon give way to file sharing, social media and streaming. Sure, downloading music from the Internet was technically a thing that people could do in 2000, but, for a lot of us, it was pain in the ass. Instead, you might have caught Peaches when she toured with Elastica in 2000. More likely, you heard her at a club or through a friend or at a record store that was well-stocked in indies and imports.

The Teaches of Peaches also foreshadowed the wave of 21st century dance floor feminism that was to come. Alongside contemporaries like Le Tigre and Chicks on Speed, Peaches challenged gender-based stereotypes within the context of dance music and infused it with a punk attitude. What was most radical about the album was that Peaches was real in a way that the women of 2000 were not allowed to be. The double-entendres and radio un-friendly lyrics were what people noticed, but she was untangling a complicated knot of sex, gender and relationships. Casuals listeners, even some music critics, may have zoomed in on the fuck and overlooked the pain.

“It sounds fun when I sing ‘Fuck the Pain Away,’ but it also has that obvious pain,” Peaches said in a 2018 article in The Guardian accompanying her appearance on The Start podcast. In that same article, she explained that The Teaches of Peaches was a breakup album, and that the Roland synthesizer she used to make it was a way consoling herself. As she played with the tropes of breakup songs, Peaches actively shifted the power dynamics of popular music. “‘Lovertits’ is a breakup song – hoping that there will be reconciliation. The term ‘Lovertits’ was me trying to create a new cliche for the kinds of names lovers have for each other – like ‘googoo baby’ or something,” she explained then. “Many times on the album, I tried to focus on a woman doing the objectifying – as in the song ‘Diddle My Skittle’ – because there are so many words for a guy’s genitalia.”

This would all become part of the language that Peaches used on subsequent albums. She continued to flip gendered connotations of language, like on her follow-up album Fatherfucker, and use double-entendres to make a deeper political statement, as with her 2006 album, Impeach My Bush. But, what’s even more interesting is how deceptively simple she made it all seem on The Teaches of Peaches. Her approach to lyrics was just as spare as the music, with verses that repeat and lean choruses. They were songs that became earworms quickly, with lines like “Only double A/Thinking triple X” (“AA XXX”) and “Motherfuckers want to get with me/Lay with me, love with me, all right” (“Set It Off”), songs that ran through your head so often that you couldn’t help but think about the points that she was making.

“Fuck the Pain Away” was the first lesson fromThe Teaches of Peaches, but the course ran beyond the length of the album. Twenty years later, Peaches has continued to school audiences through her songs, live performances and videos on gender, sexuality, age and body positivity. She’s become an icon of 21st century feminism and music, but it all goes back to that one turn-of-the-millennium club hit.

ONLY NOISE: Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving is a controversial holiday with a wretched color scheme. The Hallmark credo of thankfulness is thin when stretched against this country’s historical relationship with Native Americans. The shirking of materialism is undercut when Black Friday rolls around. To many, Thanksgiving is merely a day to get tanked, watch college football, and shout about politics with Uncle Larry.

Holidays are hard for me. I’m not religious, my family lives 3,000 miles away, and if I did live closer to them, I’d have to decide which half to celebrate with. I don’t like the premise of most holidays either – the fact that we need a nationally ordained day to eat a meal together and be thankful has cynical implications – as if we aren’t thankful for the food we share together the remaining days of the calendar year. As you know, I could easily play the curmudgeon and pick these things apart to forever, but there is one thing Thanksgiving has going for itself that I just can’t knock: the food!

A delicious meal is a delicious meal, and I’m thankful for all of them, but Thanksgiving dinner is a particularly iconic spread of dishes only Americans can understand – like, say, canned cranberry sauce and mini marshmallow encrusted sweet potatoes. The Turkey Day smorgasbord is vast and overwhelming; gluttonous and nap inducing. In fact, it is so immense that I’ve put together a soundtrack to help us waddle through each course.

The Turkey

We don’t call it “Turkey Day” for nothin.’ You don’t have to hang your kids hand-traced paper turkey art on your fridge each year for nothin’ either. The turkey is the main event on Thanksgiving, and whether you’re the one butchering it, cooking it, or simply eating it, the big bird that goes “gobble gobble” is going to affect your life this week. So why not give the poor bird a song? “Stuffy Turkey” by Thelonious Monk is a great place to start – a classy jazz number to score the bird’s arrival, all glazed and brown and stuffed. Follow it up with the frantic “Turkey Chase” by Bob Dylan as you and your family members squabble over precious dark meat morsels. And finally, blast Butthole Surfers’ “Turkey and Dressing,” which will provide the necessary aggression to finish your plate of food, and weather Uncle Larry’s xenophobic rants.

Stuffing

When Peaches sings, “I see you sittin’ and stuffin’ your face/Why don’t you stuff me up?” on 2003’s “Stuff Me Up,” she is clearly personifying the Turkey in your kitchen, begging to be filled with breadcrumb dressing, aka “stuffing.”

A History of Siren Fest & 4Knots

The fourth annual 4Knots Music Festival is slated to wash ashore at South Street Seaport this Saturday, July 12th, and we couldn’t be more excited. The festival, curated by The Village Voice, gets better each year, with Dinosaur Jr., Mac DeMarco, Re-TROS, Dead Stars, Those Darlins, Speedy Ortiz, Radkey, Viet Cong, Nude Beach, and Juan Wauters slated to grace the 2014 celebration – and it’s all FREE. There’s also an after party at Webster Hall following the day-long extravaganza, and you can get $5 off tickets with the code VOICE by clicking here.

Though 4Knots might seem relatively new, VV cut its festival booking chops on the now-legendary Siren Music Festival, held every summer at Coney Island from 2001-2010. As our anticipation grows for 4Knots 2014, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the best performers to grace 4Knots and Siren stages.

2001 – Peaches

We’re sure Rainer Maria, Guided By Voices and Superchunk were all lovely, but come on… at the time, the gender-bending, sex-positive performance artist was riding on high on the release of The Teaches of Peaches, her debut album that featured hits like “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Set it Off.” The quirk and kitsch of Coney Island was a perfect backdrop for Peaches, who looked every bit the part of sideshow provocateur in her bright red lingerie.

2002 – Sleater-Kinney

2002 was kind of THE banner year for Siren Fest, helped in part by the fact that there was a dance-punk renaissance happening in NYC. We can just picture Karen O smooching Angus Andrew at the top of the Wonder Wheel (they were deep in lurrrrv when their bands – Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars, respectively – played the fest), and I’m sure like-minded rockers Les Savy Fav, Mooney Suzuki, The Donnas, and Rye Coalition tore shit up, while The Shins mellowed crowds out with “New Slang” years before it rocked Zach Braff’s world. But Sleater-Kinney is the best band EVER, and their live performances were unparalleled. Even some dude who writes about music a lot agrees.

2003 – !!!

No, I’m not so excited about the history of 4Knots/Siren Fest that I’ve resorted to superfluous punctuation – !!! (usually pronounced Chk Chk Chk but otherwise represented by any three repetitive monosyllables other than Yeah Yeah Yeah since that was taken) gave every ounce of energy they had into converting a boring old rock show into a full tilt dance party. The band had a rotating, often huge lineup of talented musicians, fronted by lead singer Nic Offer, whose spastic showmanship mimed the outsized gestures of arena rock performers like Mick Jagger, but in a weirder, disco-punk context. !!! were known to encourage audience participation, adoration, and most of all satisfaction – you could rest assured they’d at least give you your money’s worth. But Siren Fest, just like 4Knots, has always been free.

2004 – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead

TV on the Radio were still a baby band, Mission of Burma were already and aging punk dad band, Har Mar Superstar probably grossed everyone out (that was his thing), and Death Cab for Cutie probably made everyone too sad. Blonde Redhead is an amazing band that almost no one appreciated or remembers. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead smashed their gear and dove into the audience.

2005 – Dungen

While Q And Not U kept dance-punk alive, and Spoon continued the mellow indie dude vibes set forth by Death Cab the year before, Swedish psych rockers Dungen, who had apparently just visited Other Music, like, that day, must have thrown the audience for a real loop. Ta Det Lungt had just begun to help them establish an international reputation, and even though none of their songs were sung in English, there’s no doubt the weed cloud hanging over the Cyclone after their set helped with the language barrier.

2006 – Scissor Sisters

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Scissor Sisters Siren Fest 2006 — Scissor Sisters’ nearly full frontal frontman Jake Shears in 2006

I bet Celebration was so, so fucking badass that year because Katrina Ford is a goddess and I’m excited for their upcoming album and I’m excited for their show at Baby’s All Right on July 25th but Jake Shears literally stripped down to a Speedo.

2007 – M.I.A.

Just look at how sweet M.I.A. was before all the Vanity Fair hoopla, before the SuperBowl middle finger, before H/Bollywood got its hands on “Paper Planes,” before the trainwreck that was /\/\/\Y/\… M.I.A’s music has evolved a lot over the years, but she’s always been one of the “Bad Girls,” with enough swagger to last for decades. Though we couldn’t have known it then, her Siren appearance was a rare treat, free of backlash and media sniping and all about the jams. The Black Lips put on a great live show, and are also no stranger to controversy, having recently talked shit on Drake and Lorde, that one time Jared Swilley and Nathan from Wavves got into some fisticuffs in a Brooklyn bar… and oh yeah maybe they’re racist? 2007 Siren, you were a real breeding ground for dissension.

2008 – Times New Viking

While Broken Social Scene is great at cramming a ton of talented musicians on stage, I have to hand it to my Columbus, Ohio hometown heroes Times New Viking for blasting such a huge crowd with their lo-fi gems. I have super fond memories of seeing them play dive bars and basements and living rooms, but their gloriously dingy pop songs harbor all the rickety charm of Astroland, where any ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl in 2007 might have been your last ride on anything, ever.

2009 – Monotonix

When Monotonix crowd surf, they don’t just flop along in a sea of sunburned arms like most bands. First of all, these dudes get pretty much naked except for underpants, socks, and copious amounts of body hair. Second of all, they spend the majority of their set in the audience, as opposed to the casual one-and-done method of even the punkest punks. Third of all, they take their instruments into the crowd with them. These nutso Israelis played over 1000 shows in five years, 400 of them happening between 2006 & 2007, so fourth of all, setting themselves on fire and shit was routine for them.

2010 – Screaming Females

The thing about festivals is that sometimes they’re less than ideal scenarios for the bands that play them. It’s hot, it’s bright, and the sound engineering can be really questionable. After insisting on using his own drums rather than the rented kit Siren provided, Jarrett led Screaming Females on a rambling pre-set jam session to ease any jitters. They also turned their monitors off, because according to this adorable blog post he thought it “better to have no mix than a crazy one.” Anyone who’s heard Marissa Paternoster playing guitar knows she shreds; I can’t imagine headliners Matt & Kim (the only band to play Siren twice!) played a better set than Screaming Females in their 2 o’clock slot.

2011 – Titus Andronicus

Though it made everyone a bit sad when Village Voice moved their annual shindig from an awesome beachfront amusement park with tons of history to, well… a mall with an Uno’s Pizzeria, they at least had the respect for tradition to rename the fest 4knots (the speed at which the East River flows) and booked another expertly curated lineup, which included headliners Titus Andronicus. Their appearance came just after gaining tons of recognition for their intelligently rendered album The Monitor, loosely based on Civil War-inspired themes, not to mention their aggressive live shows. The lineup has since changed but our favorite incarnation of the band featured Amy Klein on violin and guitar. Ahhh, memories.

2012 – The Drums

We’ve always appreciated the swagger of Jonny Pierce, and his band’s beachy vibes practically scream outdoor dance party, so The Drums were a perfect fit with 4knots. 2011’s Portamento saw the group shift from surfy to synthy (the title is a tribute to the analogue settings Pierce and bandmate Jacob Graham bonded over as kids), so we couldn’t be more excited about the upcoming release of their latest album, slated for sometime this year.

2013 – Parquet Courts

There’s a reason these Brooklyn punks quickly gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the best live bands to see, and their ultra-sweaty performance at last year’s sweltering 4Knots is a perfect example. The two things I remember most about last year’s 4Knots were The Men covering Iggy Pop with a rousing horn section, and Andrew Savage extending “Stoned & Starving” with a ten-minute long rant about social media and commodified music that felt both prescient and tongue-in-cheek. You really never know what to expect from a Parquet Courts set except that it will be rowdy. Similarly, we never know what to expect from a Village Voice music fest – so make sure you’re at South Street Seaport on Saturday for this year’s 4Knots!

Tag: Peaches