Moldy Peaches Ripen on Stage

They’ve garnered almost as much buzz as fellow New Yorkers and recent tour mates the Strokes, but the Moldy Peaches have more in common with the kids from South Park than the aforementioned retro-rock pinups.

While the group’s wonderfully wacky show at the Knitting Factory on Friday offered its share of riff-packed raucousness and slacker-style artiness, its subversive humor outshone everything else, and that’s obviously the point.

The Peaches, led by singer-songwriter duo Kimya Dawson and Adam Green, may not take themselves too seriously (they’re known for outrageous costumes; this show featured Dawson in a clownish hippie get-up and Green in a relatively demure rhinestone-studded pair of girl’s jeans). But their combination of childish sing-along-style ditties about sex and drugs, and noisy punk anthems about cartoons and adolescent crushes, is more irony than quirky shtick.

Part of the New York “anti-folk” scene, the Peaches’ unplugged simplicity was joyously captured, flaws and all, on their self-titled Rough Trade debut album last year. The pair use a full band live, an addition that takes away intimacy from a couple of tunes but never detracts from their biting wit. More aggressive tunes such as “NYC’s Like a Graveyard” and “D2 Boyfriend” gained an extra layer of power and rhythm that brought to mind Beck’s groove-y melodies and Sonic Youth’s eclectic assaults.

Smartly, they stayed true to low-key compositions such as “Jorge Regula” and “What Went Wrong,” Dawson’s painful portrayal of unrequited teen love.

It was with these more emotive cuts that the Peaches showed some range. Still, with the audience seeming to prefer lyrically depraved numbers such as “Who’s Got the Crack,” it may be hard for the band to ever be seen as more than a novelty act.