Peachcake
Daytrotter Session - Sep 13, 2009
- Keep The World Safe, Tony Soprano
- Hundreds & Hundreds of Thousands (Fat-Tuesday’s Extended Dance Remix)
- Stop Acting Like You Know More About The Internet Cafe Than Me
- Souls Have No Drum Machine
- The Song of the Century!
- Nervous Breakdance! (The Confused Version)
What you want to say, just blurt out is, “No fucking way,” when you hear that the electro-pop band Peachcake is from Carefree, Arizona, but thems are just the facts. It’s so fascinating because to see the group live, to hear them in song or in conversation, it’s the place that Stefan Pruett and John O’Keefe would seek out even if such a place were no more real than a unicorn or a jackalope/stagbunny/Wyoming thistle hare. The two odd ducks already consider their home planet to be Planet Awesome, which, from our calculations, is made up exclusively of sugary foods, strobe lights, thumping drums in loud music, beds made out of marshmallows and hot fudge, ubiquitously free wireless Internet, jingle bells attached to every shoe and sprinklers that you can run through at any time of the day. Peachcake music is insistent with its intentions. It is forcibly joyous and spastic. It demands to be hearted. It demands to be grinned at and moved to. It is supposed to change your mood from sour milk to sun kisses within minutes of the first song. They hunt down your inhibitions and they take them out with very good sniper rifles. Pruett and O’Keefe acknowledge the cold adversity of life in a spoken introduction to their song “Nervous Breakdance,” but they seem to be unwilling to acknowledge it too extensively or to give it all that much mind. It’s just something to walk around, to avoid swiftly, instead listening for the circus-y song of the ice cream truck coming down the block for another frozen treat because it’s a guaranteed good time. They bank on those kinds of guarantees in like not the morbid ones like death and taxes. To hell with those, you can almost hear them singing between the lines, wearing clown noses or shifting their voices comically. They don’t seem to tire or go dark, just flow and sweet talk their way in the pleasure centers of other peoples’ souls. They ask the important questions in their between song banter, posing, “How hard is it to choose to be in a good mood, my friends?” and while this is a serious entreaty, they ask with the sounds of baaaaa-ing sheep popping off in the background. The sheep calls make the intentions feel legitimate and you feel yourself thinking of negativity as a plague as well, joining the side of the Peachcake.