Pet’s new album is unexpected triumph

Jemina Pearl’s enthusiasm is infectious.

By Jordan Sargent
March 14, 2008

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Courtesy of Ecstatic Peace

(Click graphic to enlarge)

In 2006, Be Your Own Pet released their self-titled debut to marginal acclaim. Popular talking points: on Thurston Moore’s label, girl singer is “energetic” so we can compare her to Karen O, they have a good live show (girl singer shrieks like Karen O) and so on. And not that any of those things are off, but if there ever were a band seemingly engineered for 100-word blurbs where only 20 of those words talk about the music, it’d be a teenaged band with a great female singer who is the crown jewel of the label of one of indie’s luminaries.

Shame, too, because that self-titled is, in this brain-space at least, a near-classic, a barely 1/2 hour-long celebration of bicycles, boys, running away with boys, dumping boys, getting high and (hey indie kids) having fun, with no time to breathe until the thing ends. The vehicle behind that self-titled is mostly the “girl singer” Jemina Pearl who, as a great songwriter, belies both her age and her reputation as someone who is fun to see but not to hear.

Her greatest strength is her ability to flaunt her and her band’s age with both a wink and a scowl, waving around words like “rad” and “awesome” like flags in some instances, but turning it in on themselves in others, like on the last album’s great “Adventure”: “Okay, so yeah, it’s cool/’Cause, we’re, like, adventurers.” Pearl also writes songs that are patently teenaged but manage to cross the battle lines mostly because her energy is so infectious, but also because we’ve all been there and thought that.

Most importantly, she articulates it like we probably would have. She dumbs herself down, but it’s smart.

So, the follow-up. You’d be smart to think a sophomore slump was in the bag here (hell, I, fanboy, kind of did), mostly because smart money would bet that a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds would run themselves out of riffs and subject matter after about, say, 20 or so songs. But the main rain cloud was the word that stalks most people our age: maturity.

Thankfully, Get Awkward is no less “mature,” and it suffers nothing because of it. That’s not to say the band doesn’t run itself thin in places (though, arguably, this is part of the charm), but Get Awkward is an outstanding follow-up because Be Your Own Pet have made a second album that is distinctly their second, and they’ve done it without making any sacrifices. No horns, no synths, no strings, no concessions.

Lead single “The Kelly Affair,” a paranoid pre-warning about living and recording in L.A., illustrates their new formula perfectly. The subject matter (let’s party, but this could be dangerous) and attitude (fuck it) are nothing new, but as the band launches into the chorus the percussion drops out and handclaps are ushered in. It’s a subtle, and kind of brilliant, curveball.

Same goes for “You’re a Waste,” a song that sees Pearl in full middle-finger mode, but the band slowing down their careening riffs for one that could be mistaken for something from The Strokes.

On “Becky,” Pearl tries out an elastic melody on the verses before raging into the chorus (she kills Becky), and on “The Beast Within” the band finally lets loose with an epic, loud-ass solo (new for them).

So, Get Awkward is a triumph and a success, and an unexpected one at that. They’ve managed a second album that is sanded and grown, but they’ve done it without losing any of the snot from their noses. And that is, you know, like, fucking rad.

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Pet’s new album is unexpected triumph

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