Be Your Own Pet
Let's Get Sandy (Big Problem)

There’s something wrong, rotten even, with the reservoir water down Nashville way these days – someone, somewhere, dumped a trafficker’s cargo so as to avoid police detainment, and now the tap-sucking kids are totally wired. Turbocharged teens Be Your Own PET have bottled it up and taken it on a field trip to the grimy alleys of NYC, around the back of CBGB’s at kick out time after some seventies punk extravaganza. Leather, big hair, low-slung axes and bucket upon bucket of adrenaline and booze.

‘Let’s Get Sandy (Big Problem)’ lasts for under a minute but bullets past the listener in what feels like a matter of single-figure seconds. It’s breakneck throughout – no real hook, no poptastic key change – and is as trashily brilliant as the earliest and most endearing records Yeah Yeah Yeahs have produced to date. Vocalist Jemina rasps like a rebellious kid told to go to bed without supper – straight up the stairs and out again down the drainpipe – while her band mates smack the shit out of everything in front of them as if they never needed them again. This moment is_ everything_, what happens tomorrow we deal with then, ears still stinging and fingers bloody.

Young, dumb and full of the violent energy of a hundred ASBO-rockin’ pre-teen terrorists, Be Your Own PET’s rawness is every bit as refreshing, as exciting, as the epic indie that’s attracted plaudits this year and last – Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, et cetera. Where they enchant, this enrages. Its innocent simplicity is its uniqueness, its infectiousness as sweet as single malt through a drip.