In Need Of A Helping Hand With More Than Two Fingers

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 22, 2006

Bernard Zuel

BE YOUR OWN PET

Be Your Own Pet (Remote Control/Inertia)

YEAH YEAH YEAHS

Show Your Bones (Modular)

Make a noise and make a name. Easy really. It's one explanation for whatever is this year's, this month's or, if you're talking the British music press, this week's hottest new band.

No matter what the Gospels tell you, the meek shall not inherit the charts, so being outrageous or making a racket that sticks out from the rest is a prerequisite to being talked about.

The Nashville quartet Be Your Own Pet cover both bases, first by being aged between 16 and 18 and having a striking blonde singer, Jemina Pearl, who gets called jail bait by dirty mac-wearing journalists, and then by making the kind of bratty buzzsaw punk where brevity rules, the lyrics cover lust, louts and natural lysergics and your school-age singer can stick two metaphorical fingers up and bark: "I'm here to steal away your virginity / I'm an independent motherf---er."

There is more to them than this collection of cliches, but not a lot more. A few tracks, such as October, First Account, suggest there's room for growth but for now their debut album is 33 minutes of red cordial-fuelled energy barely coiled around overdriven guitars furiously riffing until fingers or ears bleed. It's fun for a while.

The New York trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to whom BYOP have been most often compared, did the noisy flavour-of-the-month thing a couple of years ago. They had an urgent drive, a punk crossed with avant-garde shape and a singer, Karen O, who seemed completely untamed. Unlike the Nashville kids, however, the YYYs had a firmer grasp on songs, their range extending from the atonal to the moodily evocative. That base material has blossomed appreciably on this second album.

The vocal pyrotechnics seem less contrived and mostly O sounds somewhere between Lena Lovich and Ari Up of the Slits. The snakeskin-and-leather guitar work of Nick Zinner builds broader and more complex arrangements, keyboards deepening the sound. And drummer Brian Chase has fine swing. Consequently, when they have something as epic as Fancy, they grip you and take you on the journey.

If Be Your Own Pet are paying attention, they could pick up a few tips from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on how to get beyond being this year's model.

smh.com.au

Hear Be Your Own Pet's Wildcat! and Yeah Yeah Yeah's Phenomena at smh.com.au/music.