Be Your Own Pet's latest output includes two songs that give an indication of just how well these kids can grow. "Becky" (available only on XL's UK version of the album) has a faint girl-group tinge and a classic girl-group subject: It's an over the top best-friend break-up song, running from tears in the lunchroom and final demands ("Give me back all the clothes you borrowed/ Don't give me bullshit, bring them to school tomorrow") to after-class ambushes and knife-fights in the halls. High-school snot, right? But then there's lead single "The Kelly Affair", which cribs from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Now it's the story of a hot young band, just arrived in Southern California and surrounded by high-rolling, pill-popping sex addicts. "It could be dangerous," says singer Jemina Pearl, "living in this valley." But she sings it like someone who's not particularly worried, and smirks it out like someone who's hungry for a little of that danger.
So Be Your Own Pet have graduated from high-school sass to world-conquering-- with a new drummer, no less-- without losing any of the lovable Muppet-like punk enthusiasm of their first record; they still come at you in a way that could probably make college kids feel ancient. On Get Awkward, the band has become a lot more precise, which always happens when you're developing your songs in a studio instead of just rampaging over crowds in bars. And what happens when you combine teenage punk, chops, and precision is, well, a little bit of glam: The guitar work here is still ten times rangier and more inventive than you'd expect, but it takes a few very professional steps back, nailing down its snappy flourishes amid ecstatic "whoo!"s, new-wave poses, and occasional clouds of glitter and confetti. With the band members' ages now clustered somewhere around 20, that glam is still the fascinating thing about this act-- they're from what might be the first generation to see American hardcore punk not as a venue for intense, frustrated guys to scowl at the world, but for good-time kids to bounce around like insane teddy-bear rock stars. It's not as if Black Flag never indulged in happy gang chants about watching TV, but they never sounded as thrilled about it as this band does on "Bummer Time", let alone on the song about food fights (timeless chorus: "Sucks to be the janitor!").
That's not to say that this album's half-hour running time doesn't sag in spots. Once you start sounding a little more slick, it can get hard to keep selling that rickety energy, song after song. And while Pearl's singing voice has developed beautifully, she has some nagging bad habits with the lyrics-- sometimes it's the kinds of rhymes that make you cringe once you pass legal drinking age, and sometimes it's the way she'll get stuck for subject matter and riff off whatever movie was on TV the night before. ("Bitches Leave", a piece of girl-on-girl crime in that mid-album sag, jumps off from a line in Robocop but gets points for a great snarky aside about women trying to impress people by claiming to like anal sex.) It's a surprise, because some of her lyrics here are terrifically blunt and on-point, especially when she's singing about liking guys she shouldn't: "Heart Throb", the album's best song, may be addressed to the man in the title, but it feels more like she's coaching herself on how not to go boy-crazy when she's already with someone.
That's what's less of a surprise: Pearl continues to make being young, blonde, awesome, zombie-obsessed, and in a cool band seem entirely relatable, like her rock heroism is genuinely on behalf of smart-ass misfit girls the whole country wide. When she's giving the kiss-off to that former best friend on "Becky", the guys in the band step up for some backing vocals, shouting "We don't like Becky anymore!" in unison. There's something in that, and in the three-song run of perfect enthusiasm near the start of this record, that makes it easy to look past any moments where the steam runs out: They might be out of high school, but these kids sound tight-knit and generous, exactly the kind of Muppety teenage punks you'd want to drink beer with and have backing you up in any knife-fights after homeroom.
