Pitchfork

There are plenty of perfectly good ways to say "I don't give a fuck." Unfortunately, screaming "I don't give a fuck" at the top of your lungs over and over again isn't one of them. It's hard to imagine anything sadder than someone expending such a huge amount of energy trying to prove that, no, really, she doesn't give a fuck-- except, of course, for this desperate plea for attention being followed by the very apathy and disaffection it promises. Such is the case with Peaches' intensely disappointing second album Fatherfucker, which couples gratuitously "shocking" and embarrassingly unfunny lyrics with flat, lackluster instrumentation.

For all its sexed-up bravado, Peaches' debut, last year's The Teaches of Peaches, was in a class of its own, if nothing else: something about the way she approached her subject matter with such hilarious juvenility and unabashed, joyful conviction, while going to all possible extremes to make herself appear as unapproachably hideous as possible, struck me as irresistible. Right from its frank opening line, "Sucking on my titties," the album lived up to its name, providing a urgently needed collection of dirty schoolyard ditties for the immature and oversexed electroclash set. One of its best attributes was its ability to leave you wondering whether Peaches took any of it seriously: was she actually promoting a lifestyle of canned drum machine beats and empty, gratuitous sex, or sending it up so masterfully that her songs could be embraced by the very people she mocked?

Either way, the joke's on Peaches here. When Fatherfucker opens with "I Don't Give a Fuck", in which a sample of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" is answered, over the course of nearly two minutes, with a painfully drawn-out tantrum: "I don't give a fuck! I don't give a fuck! Shit! Fuck! Shit! Fuck!" Yet, as outright terrible as this track is, Fatherfucker's general mediocrity and sterility proves even more frustrating. The gritty, overdriven 808 beats of Teaches were one of its greatest assets-- a welcome respite from the glossy, platonic ideal percussion tracks employed by so many electroclash artists.

The beats on Fatherfucker are not only frustratingly simplistic, but the energy and surprising rhythmic complexity of the vocals on her debut are noticeably absent, too. Songs like "I U She" and "I'm the Kinda" consist of little more than minimal and repetitive lyrics delivered dispassionately over cookie-cutter drum machine beats. Whether she's singing about bitches, fucking, clits, threesomes, or porkbelly futures doesn't really matter; after a few songs, you, like Peaches, don't give a fuck-- and you don't have to fuck up a Joan Jett record to prove it.

Nor do you have to indulge in a miserable, stupidly self-referential duet with Iggy Pop. In "Tear It Up", Iggy and Peaches throw back and forth snippets of each other's lyrics and references to their respective schticks. "I used to cut myself up!" says Iggy. "Some people don't like my crotch!" says Peaches. "Hey, guys, shut the fuck up!" says the imaginary singer I hallucinated out of boredom, offering up a lyric far too honest and straightforward to have been worked into the original song.

Lame duets aside, there remain a lot of things I really like about Peaches. With all the press coverage she's been receiving as of late, she continues to willfully defy all conventional notions of attractiveness in the way she chooses to be photographed, and her live shows remain entertaining, despite weaker source material. Yes, Fatherfucker is a disaster, but it's a disaster that reveals just how unlikely its still-excellent predecessor was. Here, the swollen charisma and balls-out energy of Teaches is given up in favor of mediocre songs about swollen balls. Sorry, Peaches, but sometimes it pays to give a fuck.