Be Your Own Pet
Issue #35
Get Awkward (Ecstatic Peace/Universal)
By Arianna Stern
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 2:49pm
Pop Get Awkward in your CD player and opener “Super Soaked” will accost you with a battle cry, passionately hollered by lead vocalist Jemina Pearl: “Teenage mayhem is on my brain / Got a wild-eyed feeling I can’t explain.”
More than anything, Get Awkward tells a vivid story about staring down the seemingly unavoidable path toward a stifled adulthood, then taking lots of drugs and running like hell in the other direction. As the band’s main lyricist, Pearl emerges as the story’s main character: an all-singing, all-dancing, teenage-gang Deb that would totally shank her onetime best friend for spreading rumors about her (as in “Becky”). At times, her rude girl persona makes her a relatable antihero, like when she tells off a lame boy in “Twisted Nerve” (“You’re such a tease / You’re such a jerk / Why do I waste my time?”). Sometimes, she just seems mean, like when she excoriates groupies in “Bitches Leave,” shouting, “Do you think anyone wants you to stay? / How’d you get back here anyway?”
“Black Hole,” a track about slumming around a boring hometown — most likely the Pets’ native Nashville, Tennessee — reminds of AC/DC or Joan Jett. The guitar-heavy intro on “Blow Yr Mind” shows off Jonas Stein’s technical abilities, which also come in handy on the twitchy girl anthem “Heart Throb.” The impeccably timed driving bassline of “The Kelly Affair” shows that Nathan Vasquez is no slouch, either. On drums, John Eatherly sets the breakneck pace on a 15-track album that, like its predecessor, clocks in at around 30 minutes.
Be Your Own Pet’s star shines so brightly it threatens to supernova, and the band conveys jittery adolescent wildness so well on this album, it seems they might have exhausted that material — which sets up an interesting challenge for the next one.
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