Out of all the weeks in the year it is kind of funny that this Tennessee four-piece’s noisy debut sees light of day in the same week that Yeah Yeah Yeah’s more sophisticated sophomore effort hits the shops. If there was a single reason for Be Your Own PET’s existence (or at least their commercial existence, the fact that you know their name) then it is New York’s artiest rock trio – not necessarily because they are the only band capable of influencing such a raucous adolescent globule of punk thrashing, but because they very much re-set the appetite (and precedent) for it. It’s a surprise that this turns out to be funny interesting though and not funny hee-hee, which we always expected because it just didn’t seem possible for them not to inwardly collapse like a condemned decay-ridden shack under the application of pressure.
Yet they uphold the fresh-faced cross-eyed pheromone-charged liquor-breath-masked-with-mints pandemonium that gushed from their intoxicating first release, ‘Damn Damn Leash’ throughout an urgent 15-tracks-in-barely-30-minutes projectile. And you want a gauge of attitude? “I’m an independent motherFUCKER!” hyperventilates explosive waif Jemina Abegg like a rebounding rubber band snorting helium and nails in ‘Bunk Trunk Skunk’, “…and I’m here to take youuuur money!!”. A remarkably honest beginning, but that’s not all. As the walls close in and the lights strobe she’s also about “to steal away your virginity!”. There’s setting out your stall, and then…
It’s an album that never lets up. In a way it’s way too loud, too fast, too raw, too screamy and generally too pointless. Which of course makes it enormous fun, from front to back. It’s hardly respite, but ‘October, First Account’ is like a chink of light cracking through a hole in the door and sounds like Belly put through the wood-chipper. That aside, every tune is the sound of Jonas Stein flambéing his guitar, peppered with Jemina’s tart vocal grit, and force-feeding it a pack of stray dogs. The best of these are the Ramones-in-200-mph-road-race-with-The-Breeders blood-blister-bursting ‘Ouch’, the haywire car alarm ‘Wildcat!’, and ‘Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle’ for its title alone. In a way it had to be released the same week as ‘Show Your Bones’, how else were they to pass the baton?