Be Your Own Pet releases second album, focuses on silly topics and catchy lyrics
Posted on March 31, 2008
Be Your Own Pet has always been about having fun and doing what you want; an attitude that doesn’t change on their newest album Get Awkward. The band, a collection of rag-tag, early twenty-somethings, knows how to rock a party.
Captained by fetching lead-singer, Jemina Pearl, the band’s garage-punk sound first broke onto the scene with their self-titled debut album in 2006. With its loud, catchy hooks and silly songs – “Bicycle Bicycle You Are My Bicycle” — and scandalous – “I am a wildcat/You are a worm/We are chasing each other and taking turns” — the album quickly garnered much praise from critics and became one of the year’s more entertaining listens.
Now a couple years older, Be Your Own Pet thankfully hasn’t lost any of its youthful enthusiasm. On Get Awkward they’re still full of that teenage angst and apathy, letting it out with amusing songs and some killer electric guitar.
Most of the issues are your stereotypical teenage fare: flirtatious glances, the boredoms of small-town life, broken hearts and so forth. But that’s not to say the songs are uninventive. In fact, one of Be Your Own Pet’s greatest strengths is its ability to put its own unique spin on common, everyday themes. Take the song “Becky,” with most bands it’d just be a typical song about high school drama, but Be Your Own Pet manages to sing about knife fights. The smirks don’t stop either thanks to “The Kelley Affair,” a homage to the movie “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” or “Food Fight” – there’s even a song called “Zombie Graveyard Party.”
The band’s sharp guitar play, along with Pearl’s rough yet splendid vocals only enhances its fast and loud approach to music. The songs on Get Awkward are more polished and detailed, removing some of the grittiness and abrasiveness of its previous work.
Even after replacing the band’s former drummer with John Eatherly, Be Your Own Pet, consisting of Jemina Pearl (vocals), Nathan Vasquez (bass) and Jonas Stein (guitar) manage to sound as if they’ve known each other forever. The chemistry and cohesiveness of the band comes through in good-spirited songs like “Bummer Time” and during some hilarious intros and ends to songs.
Get Awkward, for all its fun, isn’t anything amazing or incredibly noteworthy. At times it sounds repetitive and immature. But sophomore albums are tricky to make, especially when you’re the same age as a sophomore in college.
In some ways the album mirrors the maturation of the band, learning their musical abilities and limitations. Even the title Get Awkward seems to encourage embracing a personal acceptance of awkward stages, with the idea that the result is finding out more about oneself.
However, the promise is there. This young band has a lot to look forward to, and as Jemina wails in the opening song “Super Soaked”: “Next year I’ll be 21/Look out world ‘cuz I want to have fun.” Take note world: you’ve been warned. Be Your Own Pet is on the move.
