Cannibal Cheerleader

Look Back In Anger

BE YOUR OWN PET BREAK UP
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
According to various sources and the band’s own website, Cannibal Cheerleader favorite Be Your Own Pet are calling it quits! This comes after some admittedly rocky times in the band’s existence, what with the cancellation of the group’s Warped Tour dates to the censoring of three tracks off their sophomore LP Get Awkward (which of course were only released in the US later on the EP Get Damaged). This shocking announcement from the band reads:

“To all of our fans,

We are sad to bring you the news that our upcoming shows in the UK (dates below) are going to be our last as a band. We thank you for all your love and support these past few years – its been a blast but the time has come for the 4 of us to go our separate ways.”

Incredible stuff it seems and unbelievably disappointing. However, we here at Cannibal Cheerleader count ourselves as lucky because we were able to experience and celebrate the band live multiple times. In celebration of this fantastic band we bring you our top five favorite BYOP tracks of all time (read below) and a special essay at the bottom of this update chronicling the meteoric rise of this unbelievable punk act. Godspeed you kids, we know you’ll pop up soon in some other form.

5. Be Your Own Pet – “Becky”
4. Be Your Own Pet – “October, First Account”
3. Be Your Own Pet – “Black Hole”
2. Be Your Own Pet – “Hillmont Avenue”
1. Be Your Own Pet – “Girls on TV”
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THE VIVIAN GIRLS PREP NEW SINGLE
With a tear in our eye we nonetheless forge ahead with other music news, as one of our favorite new acts the Vivian Girls have announced their first single from their self-titled debut, “Where Do You Run To”, which combines all the things we love about these ladies – their girl-group vocal trade-offs, their ramshackle and layered guitarwork, and their surfer-chic groovy vibe. Check it out below and tell us what you think!

The Vivian Girls – “Where Do You Run To”
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NEW BAND CHEER: THE GRATES
We’ve known about the Grates for a few years now, ever since they popped onto the radar with their first LP Gravity Won’t Get You High. However, they’ve recently exploded to the forefront with their newest release Teeth Lost, Hearts Won, and it takes the patented Grates sound and pushes it into swirly new territory. The group, a trio from Australia, essentially fills the void left empty by no new Yeah Yeah Yeahs releases, what with their female lead singer, and combo guitarist and drummer rounding out the band. However, lead singer Patience Hodgson brings a unique vocal bratiness to the table and the instrumentation tends to lean towards a pop sensibility with handclaps and shout-answer choruses in place of arty guitar breakdowns. If the YYYs are rip-snarl, the Grates are kiss-backstab: just a little bit of popster-sweetness with a bloody rock tip. Here are some tracks to feed your hunger.

The Grates – “Burn Bridges”
The Grates – “Storms and Fevers”
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TERROR THURSDAY: PRISON
Oh Viggo Mortensen, you steal our hearts everytime. For lack of a better description, this week’s Terror Thursday feature of Prison was horribly satisfying. Featuring several solid barbed-wire kills, enough gore to make the theater floor sticky, and our favorite hobbit-helper in his first ever starring role, Prison delivers on its simple premise and easily grabs four out of five bloody pon-poms from us. Go rent it!
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BE YOUR OWN PET ESSAY
Here’s our special Be Your Own Pet essay written specifically for our Cannibal Cheerleader zine (out next week all around Austin!). We were gonna make it zine exclusive but given today’s sad BYOP developments we’re releasing it now. Comment people and enjoy!

While doubtless may be punk’s indelible spirit of cavalier attitudes and ramshackle musicality, pinning down the exactitudes and definitions of the genre in an admittedly gray area like rock music can at best be described as difficult given the myriad of styles present in the modern scene. Punk, for better or for worse, has been mixed, misshapen, turned, torn, revitalized, revived, and reborn innumerable times under an infinite number of monikers, effectively declaring the word, in its original use, null and void. However, let it be known Nashville’s Be your Own Pet are punk rock. Not pop-punk, not emo, not post-punk, or punk-retro, or what have you. Be Your Own Pet are Buzzcocks punk rock, Sex Pistols punk rock, phoenix from the ashes of punk rock, so punk rock as to remind us what we were missing that whole time punk was trying to change it up, not realizing it had a good thing the whole time. Fronted by spazztastic Jemina Pearl and populated by a ragtag band of high-school-aged losers and vagrants, Be Your Own Pet and their library of fuzzy, fury-filled tracks fit just as well into the aesthetic of ’77 as any of the best bands from that era, and their penchant for artistic reference and an intelligently formed sound draw strong correlations to the Situationist movement that inspired the likes of Malcolm McClarren in punk’s heyday. The poem “Kubla Khan” speaks to the unfettered beauty of the written word, with it alliterative prose and inspiring language, and so it seems fitting that Be Your Own Pet would title the first song on their first album, “Thresher’s Flail”, after a line in the masterwork, given the foursome’s adherence to punk inspiration and naked rock ambition. Perhaps most refreshing about the group is its talent for making an admittedly basic set of riffs and hooks sound so unbelievably original and creative, speaking to both the watered-down weakness of modern punk and the firm musical foundation that the punk genre is built upon. Be Your Own Pet have seemingly managed to recapture the essence of what made punk great in the first place, and they’ve done so without sounding derivative or unoriginal but instead blazing forth with a newfound sound that utilizes rudimentary instrumentation, begets virtuosity, and replaces it with energy and a powerful delivery. The earliest of punk groups were populated by artists and poets, art school dropouts and UK record store owners. This Nashville foursome, heirs to families well-entrenched in their local independent music scene and blessed with more smarts than guitar-licks, began the Be Your Own Pet odyssey with some limited 7’’s, such as the excellent Damn Damn Leash before they landed in the lap of one Thurston Moore, who was quick to identify their youthful exhuberance as a sign of artistic integrity. With the release of Be Your Own Pet, the group’s self-title debut, press began to take notice, most notably with the age of the performers, all under 21 and most still in high-school, and the quality of music they’d amassed in their short lives. Strangely it might seem that to be young is a detriment when it comes to creativity, that somehow the more information taken in the more creative the output. However, there still remains much to be said about he influence of less influence, how a band might come to be in a bubble, how the youthful naiveté of a band like Be Your Own Pet might translate into a wildly creative force, given their unspoiled psyches. America’s culture seems obsessed with disenfranchising one of their most important and intelligent assets, that of men and women under the age of 18 or 21, believing that arbitrary numbers determine level of maturity or capability in today’s modern world. Kids fight the wars, make the changes, clean up the shit, so it would only make sense that the most outspoken and unhinged art forms come from the youth as well, and Be Your Own Pet is a prime example of this, culminating in their sophomore album Get Awkward, a seeming concept album about the reality of high school life and the mixture of maturity and madness in which adolescents live. With tracks bouncing between the subjects of knifing your best friend to blowing your brains out in a rage, Get Awkward remains a spectacular testament to the violence of youth, all the while celebrating the silliness of the mundane and the humdrum, obsessing over a breakup in “Creepy Crawl” and cheating on a lover in “Twisted Nerve”. However the crowning achievement of Get Awkward might just be the track “Food Fight” which summates the BYOP world perfectly, a combination of innocent youthful expression, violent outburst, and Situationist-referencing social commentary. The boredom and resulting expression of a nation’s young is reflective of a world of convenience become a world of sameness, and the signal of the food fight, a much storied and even cliche action, becomes a tirade against the norm in the hands of Be Your Own Pet. BYOP break convention at every turn, whether it be with rhyming structure, song length, lyrical content, or even stage presence. The simplicity in which the Nashville foursome approach their music comes across as a furious whirlwind of rawness in live form, with guitars crunching out wall-of-sound, atonal chunks of power over the heads of an astonished and often confused audience. Indeed, this often marks BYOP shows, a level of nervousness and tepidness in an otherwise engaged audience, many of whom seem shocked at the level of intensity presented before them. The approved ‘metal-head’ signals, the ‘now would be okay to mosh’ signs are not present but the music feels fast and hard. The crowd seems pretty evenly mixed in terms of sex and race and the jock machismo of modern punk bands seems mysteriously absent, replaced by hipster hesitation. Therefore, at a Be your Own pt show one can expect to be filled with an unquenchable thirst to spaz about as peers all around refuse to move for fear of being the only one to have read the signals of the moment wrong. Clearly though Jemina Pearl and co. delight in their audiences’ surprise, playing to their shocked sentiments with vomiting on stage and guitar juggling antics. The level of disconnect between audience and band reflects the forward-thinking musicality of BYOP as well as the regressive state of modern punk music. This isn’t packaged punk, punk rock made by the companies buying and selling rebellion, this is out and out revolution in simple form. Not revolution with guns and knives and blood and anarchy, but loud guitars and frenetic shrieks. BYOP stand atop a precipice of punk and are at the helm of a zeitgeist in the musical movement, championing a real return to form long since promised but rarely delivered upon, and they’ve done so by returning to the ethos of original punk while refusing to cheaply mimic their sound. In the battle against corporate rock, waging war on Warped, Be Your Own Pet lead the charge and we here at Cannibal Cheerleader are throwing all of weight behind them.

Any thoughts? See everyone next week!

Comment from Nick - August 1, 2008 at 11:27 pm

Real shame about Be Your Own Pet. But The grates and Vivian Girls are both excellent bands, perhaps not up to the standard of BYOP yet but hopefully they will one day.