Crafting a fully formed debut is no small feat, and Adelaide-born artist Peach PRC manages exactly that with her first LP, Porcelain. It’s unfortunate, then, how often it falls flat.
Opening track Piper provides a deceptively solid start. Peach PRC’s earlier use of nature as a key inspiration comes into focus here, with blissed out synths, chirping birds, soft beeps and vocal chops, where she sings of sandpipers and yearning. It’s a theme that carries through the record. Eucalyptus, in its name alone, develops the nature motif. Lyrics across other tracks, like Oasis and the closing track Shirley Barber, extend it further.
Natural imagery aside, Peach’s lyricism is at its strongest with songs that capture the young queer experience.
Peach PRC review – quick links
Candid and autobiographical
On Celebrity Crush, she sings of her love interest’s current partner: ‘I heard he’s crazy, maybe gay’. The attempt to garner attention for herself is a sharp, comedic and assuredly relatable moment for queer audiences.
On Out Loud she sings of being loved ‘like a song … through a Walkman’ within a closeted relationship, anticipating the day she can be openly appreciated. These candid, vulnerable and heartbreaking experiences will likely resonate with many queer communities.
Peach also turns to much more personal material, admitting her dad hates her guts, before recounting her experience working at a strip club. This level of diaristic frankness is especially admirable on an artist’s debut record, and for that, Peach deserves her flowers.
Nostalgic production values
Production is Porcelain’s central flaw. Pink begins with bubbly synths and delicate strings before settling into the trite and egregiously uninspired palette of all post-2005 indie pop. An album can only contain so much simple guitar and vocoder before it begins to blur into monotony.
Oasis, while home to fun and unique vocal effects, centres itself on melodies and instrumentation exhausted by bands such as The 1975 and MUNA over their decade-long careers. Single Miss Erotica suffers from the same concern with a soundscape that feels well-worn, leaning on glossy bubblegum pop synths that recall an early Lady Gaga sound.
The issue with crafting music so redolent of other artists is that it can rapidly descend into boredom if it fails to bring anything new to the table, or even just be fun. Unfortunately, across Porcelain, this is very much the case.
Strong signs of potential
The album also suffers from vocals that struggle to align with its production choices. Too often, Peach’s voice, at its most expressive and captivating, is subdued to fit equally restrained instrumentation. She sounds genuinely breathtaking at times. On Hold It For Her, her vocals meld pretty flawlessly with early-2000s-inspired drums, resulting in a clear career highlight. Elsewhere, however, there is a mismatch between vocal performance and production that drags and dulls the record as a whole.
That disconnect extends to the songwriting itself. While often dense in imagery, its lyrics rely too heavily on standard pop structures to be completely impactful. Choruses feel underwhelming, weighed down by their production, lyrics lack the melodic and instrumental lift they deserve and, as a result, everything collapses before it’s given a chance to build. Taken together, these shortcomings leave Porcelain a record consistently undermined by a sameness that dulls its impact.
Peach PRC’s attempt at a full-length studio album is a commendable one, marked by moments of diaristic honesty and captivating emotional clarity. It’s unfortunate that stale, derivative production so often dilutes its impact, dulling moments that would otherwise resonate deeply.
With only one or two standout tracks, Porcelain arrives fully formed, but begins to crack under the pressure of each subsequent listen. It reveals an artist who shows clear potential that is yet to be realised.
Peach PRC’s Porcelain is available now.
This article is published as part of ArtsHub’s Creative Journalism Fellowship, an initiative supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
