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Written by Randy Schwartz Tuesday, 01 August 2006 04:39

The debut from Be Your Own Pet is spry, sloppy, impetuous, and downright fun. It harkens back to a day, long before you discovered punk rock, when you'd inhale a 12-gauge pixie stick like a whippet and then spin around the playground hard enough to either puke or split your skull.

 

It's hard to take a pubescent punk-rock band seriously, no matter how popular they might be on MySpace. Unless you happen to check your apprehension for a couple of seconds, long enough to sample the second track posted therein. That's all that Be Your Own Pet asks of you before they launch into the sneering riot-grrl affirmation, "I am an independent mother fucker/and I'm here to take your money." Over the remaining 85 seconds, the punk-rock whirlwind that is "Bunk Trunk Skunk" spins out and damn-near runs off the rails. The rest of BYOP's full-length debut is just as much a rush, and not just for the Mountain Dew set.

It's true the band isn't old enough to do much of anything, at least not legally. But consider their pedigree: They've managed their own record label for a number of years. They broke CMJ two years ago and SXSW last year. They played Coachella back in May and were recently added to this summer's lineup at Lollapalooza. And if any one of those achievements didn't bring instant credibility, they were courted by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore to release their debut album on his Ecstatic Peace imprint. The debut from Be Your Own Pet is spry, sloppy, impetuous, and downright fun. It harkens back to a day, long before you discovered punk rock, when you'd inhale a 12-gauge pixie stick like a whippet and then spin around the playground hard enough to either puke or split your skull.

The band's lyrics drop all the stock references to medication, boredom, and the looming threat of cathartic release you'd expect, with "Bicycle Bicycle You Are My Bicycle" encapsulating this anomie-as-ideology attitude: "We will come to your town/burn your house down/turn the sky brown/all because, all because." But their firebrand lead singer Jemina Pearl's got vitriol to spare, shuffling classic grrl kiss-offs like a weathered pro: "Thought you were the only fish in the sea/thought you were the only leaf on my tree/oh please fall and break your eyesockets/I want your shotgun but you never got to cock it" ("Love Your Shotgun").

The band creates a perfect canvas for the singer's punk-rock epithets, such as the terse, spring-loaded guitar loop that winds through "Bog," a song in which Pearl confesses to drowning her boyfriend (he was a dog person, alas, she an incompatible cat lover). As she channels modern rock icons like Karen O, Courtney Love, and Kim Gordon, the band grabs all the best chops from their genre influences. Be it Jamin Orrall's thunderclap drumbeat on "Fuuuuuun" that slows down the rhythms to a spastic start-stop meter, or Jonas Stein's pitch-perfect Ron Ashton guitar solo in "Girl on TV," the band jams well beyond their years. 

Clocking in among the longest of songs (a chatty 2:32), "Adventure" also happens to be among the most developed. With a chugging rhythm section that snakes its way throughout the song, Stein's winding SoCal-guitar riff carves out some space to sit atop Pearl's tongue-in-cheek pop-tart squeal: "Okay so yeah, it's cool/'cos we're like, adventurers." Nathan Vasquez' popping bass line aside, the song could pass for classic (2003) Yeah Yeah Yeahs. From songs that thread 90 seconds to ones that run the extra minute (and make good use of it), the album does inevitably chart a good deal of growth, making it more dynamic and that much more compelling.

There's a distinct lack of purpose behind a good deal of the lyrical fare, which also happens to exemplify the band's frisky energy, and all that's right about their full-length debut. They are young, and this is not a finesse job. There may be a few wasted minutes on the 33-minute album, but at the end of the day, Be Your Own Pet is a surprisingly good debut from a surprisingly precocious band.