Be Your Own Pet: kicking and screaming
The Nashville punks play rad teen snot-rock on their new album Get Awkward. They also might be the most fun band in America.
Published June 11, 2008
About halfway through “Super Soaked,” the glass-shattering opening track from Be Your Own Pet’s newest, and second, album Get Awkward singer Jemina Pearl spits out a verse that cuts to the heart of the band’s kicking, screaming, perversely adolescent attitude: “What’s the point of doing something/ If you’re not gonna feel the pain/Some people say that I’m disgusting/I don’t care, I just think they’re lame.” Pearl chucks the word “lame” straight at your face, and while some might argue that the prevalence of words like “lame” and “rad” in Be Your Own Pet’s music is evidence of a young band with a writing deficiency, it encapsulates instead exactly what’s so great and inspiring about the band. They’re unapologetically adolescent and they revel in it, writing songs about food fights and bicycles and sleepovers, and they thrash around and kick up dirt like you really only can when you’re a teenager. And not only are they the most fun band in rock, they’re pretty damn funny. The last line of the verse quoted in the first paragraph is “Kill the rainbow... feel the rocks!” You know which song is about being bummed (called “Bummer Time”) because the dudes in the band start off by shouting, “Bummer time!/Bummer time!/It’s bummer time!/Bummer!” like 85 times. The chorus to “Food Fight” goes, “Sucks for the janitor/ Fight on!” et cetera. But, and this is key, Be Your Own Pet’s scissor-kicking legs and pumping arms are powered by a beating heart. Their songs are all about problems that plague not just juvenilia, but almost everyone else, and so it’s frankly genius when Pearl prefaces a potential boyfriend by saying, as she does in the first album’s “Bunk Trunk Skunk,” “I’m an independent motherfucker/and I’m here to take your money/I’m wicked rad and I’m here/To steal away your virginity.” Or when she addresses a break-up with the careening chorus, “But I was wrong/So wrong/I’ve been thinking about this for far too long/And I’m tired, so tired/I’m tired of this God damn love riot.” The genius lies in the fact that BYOP recognizes that sometimes when shit gets really fucked up, as it often does at our age — be it with school, parents, love, whatever — the best therapy is sometimes raging, flailing and rallying in its face and acting like you’re 15. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Pearl writes very smart lyrics, and the band bludgeons you with catchy three-chord riffs like they are inflatable hammers, but ultimately, it’s quite possible there isn’t a rock band currently working who approaches and deals with being 20 years old (or 16, or 22, or whatever) more correctly than Be Your Own Pet. For about a month this summer, the band will be playing to kids on The Warped Tour who listen to music that, arguably, approaches being an adolescent the completely wrong way. Be Your Own Pet is playing dates on the tour at the behest of their label, and, assuming 15-year-old emo kids haven’t forgotten how to have fun, the band should win over a sizable amount of fans. Still, they are a moderately successful indie-punk band playing an emo festival, and the shotgun marriage isn’t lost on the band. “There’s that kind of pressure, if you know what I mean,” drummer John Heatherly says, referring to the tour’s usual crowd. “But it will only help us in the end. It’s not too much of a drag, I’m just not really familiar with many of the other bands that are playing.” The band recorded Get Awkward last year in Nashville, and though it kind of retreats emotionally (Pearl is much more blunt and mean), the album takes a few subtle musical steps forward, like with the tender Strokes riff they bash out on “You’re a Waste,” the poppy handclaps backing the chorus of “The Kelly Affair” or the blown-out squall solos that litter a few of the better songs. “It was really fun,” Heatherly says about the recording sessions. “I think it was just like a new mood, and it had been quite a while since we’d been writing songs, and because of the new lineup and everything it was just more of practicing and organizing the songs that came naturally.” As for how the band writes their songs, Heatherly describes a process that seems as loose, fun and engaging as the songs themselves. “We’ll get together and rehearse a song, or we’ll start out with a riff, and me, Nathan (Vasquez, guitarist) and Jonas (Stien, guitarist) will play the song over and over and over again, and we’ll find the structure that we like the best,” he says. “Then while we do it, Jemina will be in the same room writing lyrics and she’ll get a good idea. Then we’ll just hook up a microphone and play it over again until we think it sounds right.” That picture probably shortchanges the band a bit, as Get Awkward does sound more polished and thought-out than their self-titled debut, an idea that’s echoed by Heatherly. “We had a good run of doing a handful of the newer songs that went on the record in May when we toured with Arctic Monkeys so we got to drive a lot of the songs ahead and really get the practice down before we recorded,” Heatherly says. And with all the time and practice in between the recording of the respective albums (and keeping in mind at least a few of the songs on their debut were probably written four or five years ago), it’s a testament to the band that they were able to expand their sound without giving in to the pressure of making a “different” sophomore album. “We’re still getting deep into, you know, more things that we like in music and it’s fun to try and bring out some of those elements into your own band, so I mean, there’s not really any pressure at all,” he says. Because the band isn’t sound checking on their current tour, they aren’t writing or fleshing out new material, but nonetheless they’re “always trying new things to keep it not boring.” As if we’re worrying.