“Adventure”
from the album Be Your Own Pet
2006
iTunes
Good old punk adrenaline courses through Be Your Own Pet, a band from Nashville whose members are barely out of high school. Its debut album, Be Your Own Pet, hurtles through its 15 songs in 33 minutes.
Jemina Pearl, the band’s blond firecracker of a lead singer, is anything but a committee-guided teenage punkette like Avril Lavigne. She yelps and taunts and sasses her way through exultant, fractured songs that are full of things to shout: “Get out of my skin!” or, in a song that makes bicycling sound like going berserk, “We’re on two wheels, baby!” She sings about lust and love, robbing banks, broken bones, holey socks and apocalyptic zombies, but the specifics are nearly irrelevant. More than anything, the songs are about sheer release or, as one title puts it, “Fuuuuuun.”
Although the album was produced by Steve McDonald from Redd Kross, Be Your Own Pet’s previous, self-made singles attest that he’s not some Svengali. And while punk is the band’s essence, it doesn’t confine the music. Be Your Own Pet doesn’t let even the shortest song — that would be the 58-second “Let’s Get Sandy (Big Problem)” — zoom along on just one riff.
In the course of the album, songs veer toward 1960s pop, Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart, Sonic Youth or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or just shift suddenly into hyperdrive. Be Your Own Pet is smart and crafty, but most of all, it’s a wild-eyed blast.