There's the authentic salty whiff of classic garage-band punk spirit about Be Your Own PET, a quartet of Nashville teens whose debut album burns up 15 tracks in a little over half an hour. With hardly a pause, and barely any change in tempo, they manage to sum up the energy and frustrations of teenage life with a slim portfolio of razor-sharp guitar slashes and brutal beats.
Vocalist Jemima Pearl doesn't so much sing as blurt out the lyrics, which perch on the cusp of decipherability just long enough to leave the occasional astringent phrase rattling round your head: "Oh I love you like the studs from my cowhide settee"; "We will vacation, you can be my parasol". "I've never had this much fun/ I've never had my own gun," she wails delightedly in the opening "Thresher's Flail", and you don't doubt her for a moment: there's a berserk, hysterical edge to tracks like "Wildcat!", "Bunk Trunk Skunk" and " Fuuuuuun" that recalls the Riot Grrrl heyday of Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland, but without any of the ideological baggage that dragged them down. Just the pure, unadulterated euphoria of building your own world of fun.
DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Thresher's Flail', 'Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle', 'Bunk Trunk Skunk'
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