The front row was all sixteen-year-old girls in bright skirts. And before the show a sulky kid snatched a Jonathan Safran Foer book out of his Dickies bag; he held it proudly near the New Trier girls. I laughed, but who was I kidding? The oldest member of Nashville garagepunks Be Your Own Pet can’t be older than eighteen; the drummer even made a crack about the bassist turning sixteen that night, though that joke’s a bit suspect.
“I am a wildcat, and you are a worm, and we are chasing each other and taking turns,” Jemina Pearl yelped in “Wildcat!” It’s an apt lyric for the act: BYOP are alternately fierce and insecure, but that shouldn’t surprise you with a pack of snotty teens. Pearl vamps with the best, sure, but she ran straight into the arms of her boyfriend at set’s end. And after tearing through four-song, barely ten-minute long bursts, they asked the audience for the next song, half-joke complaining that retuning killed the momentum.
Like any kid with ambition to spare, though, I’m sure they’d be offended if I called their irresolute stage presence endearing. So the music—it’s loud, quick, and hooky, which, by necessity, makes their live set perfectly exciting. Hardly poised, some tact in their bedroom-sized arena riffs (album opener “Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle” in particular), and off-the-wall drumming—not quite album material or the stuff of contact-free performances. My friends caught them on Conan and thought BYOP sucked; hard to disagree when their mistakes aren’t in a 300-person venue but on national TV, and volume’s as loud as the knob permits. But back in the Beat Kitchen, Pearl looked great up front—watch her yell “I’m an independent motherfucker, and I’m here to steal your virginity!”—and the band played on, all smiles.