Be Your Own Pet
Be Your Own Pet
XL/Remote Control

Some people say it's unfair to make comparisons between The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Be Your Own PET, but it's entirely natural. Brash guitars and enigmatic female lead? Check. However, with their spirit of wild adolescence, it's probably fairer to compare them to The Grates. But where The Grates are all balloons and trampolines, BYOP are more schoolyard fights and taking your BMX off sweet jumps (all whilst wishing it was a motorbike).

The group's full-length, self-titled debut barely lets up its rough and relentless pace throughout its half-hour run. While its full-on nature makes it an effort to listen to, it's definitely an effort well worth making. Love Your Shotgun typifies the album. Everything about the song is pure, from the lyrics ("Thought you were the only fish in the sea" cries Jemina Pearl) to Jonas Stein's riffing, which transitions from a Hives-esque chorus to an Iron Man-inspired bridge. Adventure sounds like a YYYs song being delivered with the childish abandon of the teenage girls from Smoosh. Less sophisticated than Pin, say, but no less endearing.

While at times the lyrics seem underdeveloped, they can in fact be quite witty and clever, at least as far as you can go with two-minute, slingshot punk. See the murder and Xanax tale, Bog, for a good example of this. Even with that kind of subject matter, BYOP comes across as more frisky than threatening.

Eddie Chan