Isabel likes booty bass music — the chatter, the rhythm, the smut. So I played her Peaches: she thought it was shrill, inflexible, unsexy. Maybe that’s the point, I started saying — I wanted to convince myself, too. It didn’t work: I’ve never played the Peaches record again. If I’d known Mocky came out of that scene I wouldn’t have downloaded it. Actually it’s wonderful.
It’s not a sexy record (it does have a great chorus, but that’s no guarantee). It’s a record that is like sex, sometimes — urgent but somehow subdued; bravado mixed with melancholy; those moments when dirty talk turns routine. Mocky wrote a song that could have been an anthem, chopped the beats and fumbled the delivery on purpose and for once it’s better this way. ‘Take me home and we can fuck all night’ he gabbles, but the sad and muffled pianos hint that what he really wants is a moment or two that go beyond this. At 2′ 54″ he gets one — a fragile shiver of keyboards. It’s simple, it’s lovely, it’s enough.