Rating:

(Estatic Peace/Universal, 2006) Much has been written lately about young punk quartet Be Your Own Pet. There’s the fact that Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore thinks they’re great, that none of the members have yet reached their twenties, and that lead singer Jemina Pearl sounds like she could be Karen O’s younger sister, among other neat tidbits. They’ve been described as punk, noise-pop, and garage rock; they certainly incorporate elements of each on their self-titled full-length debut. Each song is a catchy burst of noisy, energetic, sloppy punk rock, starting with the sonic blast of “Thresher’s Flail” and finally dying out a few seconds after the end of “Ouch,” when your ears stop ringing. There’s only one problem - fifteen straight tracks of loud, fast, yelled, banged out punk is a bit much by the end of the album. Some reviews have complained that the album is too short at thirty three minutes, but nothing would have been hurt by trimming three tracks and five minutes. And if Be Your Own Pet would like to stay in the public eye very long, they need to acquire some new tricks, despite the fact their youthful enthusiam and style are a boon to this album. Playing in the kiddie pool may be fun for a few minutes, but pretty soon you need room to stretch out, and so will these kids. Be Your Own Pet is pretty good for a teenage debut, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.

* 1. Thresher’s Flail

  2. Bunk Trunk Skunk

* 3. Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle

  4. Wildcat!

* 5. Adventure

  6. Fuuuuuun

  7. Stairway to Heaven

  8. Bog

  9. Girls on TV

 10. We Will Vacation, You Can Be My Parasol

*11. Let’s Get Sandy (Big Problem)

 12. October, First Account

*13. Love Your Shotgun

 14. Fill My Pill

 15. Ouch

* = recommended tracks

Buy album

– Kevin

This 3-beetsreview was posted on June 15th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.