BE YOUR OWN PET /// S/T /// ECSTATIC PEACE ///

It's hard to not love Be Your Own Pet. A sinister part of you would kind of take a little pleasure in writing them off as pretentious, snotty teenagers with too much allowance let loose in a recording studio, but from their now notorious live shows to their self-tiled debut album (out on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace imprint), they're starting to come off more as giddy 18-year-old music nerds who are almost as astonished as you are that they can make such great music. Gleefully breaking down the tired notion of garage rock that's gotten staler and staler over the past few years, only to build it back anew, BYOP have unleashed a torrent of aural ass-kicking unseen since Karen O appeared on our radars. I give my hat off to any band that can write "Let's Get Sandy", a 58-second Black Flag fuckfest, and then force their record label to release it as a single. There are a few dips lyrically (unless you're Prince, you should never refer to yourself as an "independent motherfucker") but even those are rectified by BYOP's brutal approach to musicianship, which as far as I can tell involves beating your instruments in time with chainsaws. "Fuuuuuun!" pummels your head with it's math rock-cum-gutter punk riffs while frontwoman Jemina Pearl Abegg shrieks about some place called The Dudezone, and "We Will Vacation, You Can Be My Parasol" mixes just the right lethal doses of sugar and spice. Basically, it's hot shit.

Text: Cameron Cook