Be Your Own PET - Be Your Own PET

Be Your Own PET is, at times, the aural equivalent of shoving your hand in a beehive. It’s hot, it’s tight, it’s frantic as hell, and it’s an unnecessarily reckless act. It has agitation writ large all over its sub-2 minute songs. And though they claim to hate poseurs (the artful use of capitalisation creates a sense of art school dropout in the band) I have no qualms in believing their profession of love for caffeine. Ain’t nothing relaxed about Be Your Own PET; nothing! Unless you wanna include their liberal use of swearing and poor grammar.

The couple of times that they do come close to resembling traditional song formats sees them sounding akin to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, against whom they are so often compared. Usually, though, the quartet sound far denser and more (in lieu of a better term let me drag out the dreaded cliché-) post-punk. If you could imagine a half-hour version of the horror orgasm breakdown in YYY’s Date With The Night, then do so. This band don’t so much spread out and make a mess as turn in on themselves. In doing so, they pull apart the seams of every perfectly good brattish anthem they write and tear it up into a patchwork of about four different pieces. And then stitch it back together, roughly. Rock’n’roll as ADD? You betcha.

Plan B magazine recently described Liars as feral disco. Allow me to plunder that term and reposition it next to a Be Your Own PET cover story. These kids are wild in the woods. Or, chances are, they are nothing like that at all: but in this game, perception is nine-tenths of the law. And this band of kids create one hell of a perception on their debut album, god love ‘em.

Previous singles Damn Damn Leash and Let’s Get Sandy (the latter, perversely, not even lasting a full sixty seconds – how’s that for performance anxiety!) are, of course, included on the album. Which, like all great debuts, is self titled. It is testament to the strength of the album’s material that neither stand out as recognisable ‘hit’ singles. Of course the disc runs by quick enough that most oft than not each song segues into the next – if you can use such a term, implying as it does a level of subtlety seemingly beyond the Be Your Own PET sound. At least in these days of of personal digital media you have some hope of keeping up with which track you are actually listening to, such is the cut’n’paste nature of thebands melodies.

It’s a killer. Damn damn sure. Perhaps too long (and fifteen songs in half an hour is hardly self-indulgent) by virtue of their Ritalin riffing, but guaranteed to stick fire into the veins of teenagers the world over. Herald, then, the new boy/girl revolution. Us old farts need to step aside and give them the respect due.