Peaches, May 15, TLA

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Peaches, May 15, TLA

POSTED: Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 8:30 PM

Filed Under: Music Show

Peaches knows how to work a room ' or make a roomful of us work for her.

Salacious she may be on record: A ten-year electroclash warrior against the bowdlerized wordplay and wardrobe-malfunction coyness of pop now.

But three songs into her audacious TLA set ' working her way through an alphabetical litany of innuendo, with the accompanying thesaurus nearby ' she no longer wanted the assembled crop of "Peaches virgins" to hear about having her. She wanted them to hold her.

As casually as she drops her beloved lyrical F-bombs, she dropped off the stage, a dead weight into the crowd.

And just like that, Philly uncrossed its arms.

Surfing on a sea of hands, she sang 'Operate' ' with its repetition, "keep it going" ' like she was reclining in an easy chair.

Course, choose to step off the conventional performance pedestal into the arms of strangers, and you might see a little up-close bad behavior.

To the guy who later reached right in for her nude-bodysuited crotch as she ha-ha-climaxed with "Fuck the Pain Away": I'm grimacing in your direction. Actually, we all were.

But in that first moment of trusting dive, daring the crowd to lift her, Merrill Beth Nisker, aged 40, was miles beyond the un-ironic burlesque stripteases her tunes have inadvertently spawned and soundtracked.

Who has time for prissy performers with a squeamish no-touch rule, she seemed to say as she surfed.

Though she didn't say that. She said: "Philthy. I love calling you that."

Only when she threw her full pint of beer into the crowd during the last verse did we notice she so far hadn't spilt a drop.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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