Be Your Own Pet – ‘Mommy’ album review: an uncompromising return to form
Sometimes, when fate intervenes on your behalf, it’s best just to ride the wave. The explosion of the American indie rock scene in the early 2000s gave opportunities to a whole list of bands who weren’t built to last. For a variety of reasons, the indie/punk/alternative graveyard is filled with its fair share of skulls. While exciting and important for their time, an act like Be Your Own Pet never really got the opportunity to bask in their influence or benefit off of their acolytes.
But luckily, things change. In a day and age where everyone from Wet Leg to Beach Bunny to Amyl and the Sniffers owes a debt to the path laid out by Jemina Pearl and her uncompromising mix of garage grunginess and pop punk, it was only a matter of time before Be Your Own Pet got a true revival. After being hand-selected by Jack White to open up a pair of shows on his 2022 ‘Supply Chain Issues Tour’, Be Your Own Pet went from tepid reconciliation to a full-on reunion as they began to release new music.
Now, we’re getting the first new album from the Nashville rockers in 15 years: Mommy. Although White is the figurehead that most will point to as the spark that led to the Be Your Own Pet reunion, it was actually White’s partner at Third Man Records (and Pearl’s husband), Ben Swank, who facilitated the revival of the band. With a whole generation of new artists taking lessons from them, how does Be Your Own Pet adapt to a new age?
As it turns out, musically speaking, the answer is not changing a goddamn thing. From the opening blasts of ‘Worship The Whip’, Mommy goes straight for the throat as though no time has passed at all. The 11 tracks of Mommy deal with fetishism, perversion, and sexual expression, a natural extension of the band’s ethos from their initial incarnation. The difference here is that the passing of time is brought to the forefront – Be Your Own Pet aren’t a bunch of kids singing about bicycles, foot fights, and late-night TV shows. Instead, they’re a bunch of adults singing about those same things.
It would have been ludicrous had Pearl and the rest of the band acted like a decade and a half hadn’t gone by. ‘Goodtime!’ stares down the reality of having two kids and a mortgage head-on, while ‘Never Again’ takes a lifetime of ill-treatment and lights it on fire. ‘Big Trouble’ is a direct look at a past persona and how the slow march of time doesn’t have to dull the sharpness of your claws. When Pearl insists that she’s “still angry” on the latter track, she leaves no room for doubt.
In case it wasn’t made clear by the song titles, Mommy has a lot of kinky eroticisms in its DNA. Tracks like ‘Erotomania’, ‘Pleasure Seeker’ and ‘Rubberist’, the latter of which gets a visual aid thanks to the album’s stark cover art, don’t shy away from the deepest recesses of sexual perversion. In fact, the reckoning between recklessness and forced maturity that becomes the album’s main theme gets its most fascinating insights in these tracks, where adulthood comes with a rubber fetish suit and a whip.
If you loved the fact that BYOP had songs that ripped off classic rock song titles (‘Stairway to Heaven’), then you’ll find that they’ve continued those traditions on Mommy (‘Bad Mood Rising’). But it never feels like the band are consciously ripping themselves off or simply leaning into their established formula. Mommy is the sound of a group reclaiming their identity after going up in flames years prior.
So what’s the best way to go: evolve and grow up or get lost in your past? On album closer ‘Teenage Heaven’, Pearl toys with the idea of revisiting a time that can’t exist anymore. That titular afterlife isn’t actually real – as Mommy shows, the only real things are mortgages, whips, and medication. But the idea that there’s still some magic left in what you created as a teenager rings true for a band that was formed by a bunch of high school friends
The energy and intensity that made Be Your Own Pet a standout act in the mid-2000s has morphed into something equally riveting. Rather than try to be teenage punks again, though, BYOP decided to evolve by getting weirder, heavier, and less self-conscious. Almost 20 years after the first was released, Be Your Own Pet finally has something resembling closure. But with any luck, Mommy will be the start of a chapter instead of a bookend.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.