Not Another Teen Band: Be Your Own Pet, Rams Head Live, May 27

Knowing the four members of

all hover around 21 years old is one thing. Seeing these noisemaking naifs--vocalist Jemina Pearl, drummer John Eatherly, guitarist Jonas Stein, and bassist Nathan Vasquez--onstage makes you think they got kicked out of an upstanding New England boarding school and decided to become the townie punk band. Clad in jeans and a navy polo shirt, Stein looks like he heard a DNA album while going from calculus class to economics and wanted to see just how much racket he could choke out of those six strings himself. Vasquez is a tall, stolid wallflower, a bassist happy to thump away in time with everybody else. Eatherly appears to take his cues from X drummer D.J. Bonebrake: say little, hit things as fast as arms and legs allow. And Pearl--who might break 100 pounds soaking wet, while wrapped in a down comforter, and holding a St. Bernard--comes across as winning the frontperson spot because her pipes unleash the best scream. And everybody else is afraid to fuck with her.

Altogether, though, the band plays its collective tiny ass off. If the 2006 self-titled debut and early concert clips posted online suggested a band that made music after staying up all night listening to the Germs and X-Ray Spex fueled by a steady diet of Ding Dongs and Jolt, Be Your Own Pet now has control over its spazzcore jolts, nuance in its one-minute rockers, and something like an overwhelming sense of purpose: rock out, have fun. Everything else--fans, records, press--is merely clutter surrounding the onstage buzz.

And what clutter there was on this eve. As part of a

Nylon

magazine-packaged "Summer Music Tour"--alongside She Wants Revenge and two other afterthoughts--Be Your Own Pet was that one thing not like the others inside a curiously empty Rams Head Live. Not exactly empty, just sparely attended, such that it felt like hardly anybody was there. It was a Tuesday school night, and the rain didn't make venturing outside that inviting, but surely somebody else knows that BYOP is the punky bee's knees right now.

Appropriately enough--in accidental honor to BYOP's newest album,

Get Awkward

--the prevailing mood in the cavernous space was awkward. A semicorporate environment was installed, thanks to lifeless

Nylon

TV spots from the South by Southwest music conference played on the house monitors, as one after another of nameless young guys in tight jeans and stubble and young women in day-glo accessories paraded by on screen. I'm the sad late-thirtysomething guy who still reads

Spin

and

Rolling Stone

and watches MTV, and I had no idea who these people were. Worse, the between-sets house music was, well, stuff I didn't like the first time around. It was like Steely Dan was DJ'ing at Hot Topic.

Luckily, BYOP smashed through the guys not dancing girls vibe with its wonderfully brisk 30-minute set. Clad in tea kettle-shiny silver tights, black-and-white-checkered Vans, short shorts, and a T-shirt featuring "party" printed on it about 500 times, Pearl stalked the stage like she knew the sooner the band went on with it, the sooner they could blow this joint. Firing through a large swath of songs off the new album ("Black Hole," Bummer Time," a fantastic "The Kelly Affair," and the sublimely ingenious "Becky") and a smattering off the debut ("Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle," "Wildcat!"), the group powered through its set with a devilish glee. Guitarist Stein and drummer Eatherly took turns sculpting the band's kinetic music, three-note guitar leads snowballing into jabbing chords pushed along at a sprinter's pace. Every once in a while, Stein jumped into the air and kicked his legs out, timed to nothing in particular, which was almost as adorably don't-give-a-shit as bassist Vasquez's equally hilarious leaps, directly up into the air and directly back down--the bassist as a comedy team's straight man.

Pearl, her pageboy crop shook into halo helmet by the second song, continues to have the best snarl in rock, a throaty, corporeal roar with such a husky belt to it that you can't quite figure out how it comes out of the young woman onstage. (My girlfriend, who has neither heard nor seen BYOP, nevertheless suggests that such force comes from her rage at having to be around dumb boys all the time.) It's the perfect vehicle for threatening a former BFF, telling all the other bitches to leave, and synopsizing

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

inside of three minutes.

And there's the onstage charisma--the wide eyes that appear to roll into the back of her head when she's shaking her entire torso around as if she's trying to escape a straitjacket, the back-and-forth head wagging with such force that you wouldn't be surprised if her head came flying off midverse (and kept right on screaming), the shock-treatment dance that combines a circa-1964 go-go dancer's legs shimmy, arms flailing as if enduring a seizure-induced trauma, and hair standing at attention as if she touched a Tesla coil. In between songs, she every so often paced across the stage and lobbed a gob of spit next to the drum riser. Somewhere, a teenage skater boy is waiting to hear about a Jemina Pearl Mishima-like personal army so he can enlist, and it was very, very heartening to see two young women in the sparse Rams Head crowd singing along to each and every word as if it were manifesto. The world is a much better place anytime more than one young woman is screaming "Me and her, we'll kick your ass/ we'll wait with knives after class."

And to top it all off, right in the middle of its set, Be Your Own Pet covered Arizona's early-1980s obnoxious, puerile punk/new wave outfit Killer Pussy, and the inner-record nerd that still lives strong inside us smiled like he just received an early birthday present.

A special thanks goes out to Rams Head Live's clockwork timing. Told on the phone that Be Your Own Pet would go on around 9:30 p.m., it was possible to park nearby at 9:20, get to the club at 9:25 as some band was finishing its awful set, stand around the club long enough to pay $4 for a soft drink, and then thoroughly enjoy the adrenaline-pumping set by the live-wire BYOP, and then leave without ever laying eyes or ears on She Wants Revenge. Much obliged.