Nemesis To Go - CDs/Vinyl/Downloads

The CD reviews for issue 5 continue here.

This is the second of two reviews pages. Click here to go back to the first page - but not before you've read the reviews below!

PJ Harvey CD PJ Harvey
White Chalk (Island)

I must admit I have approaced PJ Harvey with caution ever since her last-but-one album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, turned out to be a bit too AOR for comfort. In fact, I recall an interview in which Polly Harvey herself admitted that things got a little too smooth and meticulous on that album - a point I wish she'd made before I bought the ruddy thing. Since then, however, her natural maverick spirit seems to have reasserted itself, and while this probably does not delight the execs at her record label, who have seen all hope of smash hit drivetime anthems vanish into the distance, it does mean that PJ Harvey fans like me can return to the fold, knowing things will be interesting. This album is certainly a return to tangental form, being a collection of faux-folk bacchanals, parlour-jazz ballads and romps, which, while always remaining primly respectable, nevertheless hint at storms below the surface. Perhaps it's Polly's severe white dress on the sleeve that puts the thought of distorted Victoriana into my mind, or perhaps it's the click and clunk of the piano which drives the songs, occupying the space where, if this were rock 'n' roll, the guitar would be. Its internal workings are faithfully recorded, along with every plangent note - 'Grow Grow Grow' is a lilting pean to the upward pull of life which could've been plucked from a music box; you can even hear the rumble and click as the recording machine is switched off at the end of the song. 'To Talk To You' is the bookend at the opposite end of the shelf of life, as Polly wishes her late grandmother were alive to give counsel; here, the piano laments emptily like the sound of a Sunday school on Monday morning. Reflective and introspective without ever being merely bleak, this music quietly fascinates. Drivetime anthems might occupy another world.

PJ Harvey: Website | MySpace

The Human Value
Push & Pull (Big Deal)

Fresh from an extended foray around the UK gig circuit, this Los Angeles band has come up with a second album as immediate as a poke in the ribs, and yet with depth and subtlety, too. Not that I ever doubted them for a moment, but I'm happy to report that The Human Value's unerring new wave sensibilities are as sharp as ever. The songs here have just the right combination of nagging melodies and grit-in-the-gears rock 'n' roll roughness; everything is pulled along by the fizz and fuzz of Hiram's guitar and the tug and slide of Turu's after-dark vocals. But this album isn't just a re-tread of past glories. We know The Human Value can nail a nifty new wave number with uncanny ease; we know the band can balance effortlessly on the point where melody meets cacophony. That's what they do. But here, they go further. On this go-around, the sound overall is a little more lush and well-upholstered; the arrangements have a wide-screen scope; the sound rolls out like thunderclouds. 'Pleasant Town' kicks things off with a phat, phuzztone guitar sound, as Turu casts a baleful eye (and a deliciously drawling vocal) over the picket fence. 'Pretty Mouth' sees massed guitars fighting it out with the plonk-plonk of a cowbell on a no-shit punk rocker (the cowbell almost wins), and suitable levels of bile and brimstone are maintained on 'No Sacrifice', which marries the downhome grind of the riff to a kick-it-up chorus. A couple of older numbers crop up in re-recorded guise, and I think you're going to like the way 'Complications' (here identified as 'No. 2') has grown into a menacing, rumbling monster, all pounding and growling (big props here to James Hazley on the drums, by the way), while 'Parts' ('Parts Per Million', as was) tumbles along as if it's just been pushed off a steep hill. The live showstopper 'I Don't Care' is here, too, building from its deceptively neat and tidy intro to a veritable freakathon of angst and snarling guitars. If you already have the band's first album, you'll be glad to know that this one shoves it all onwards and upwards. If you don't have the band's first album, be sure to buy 'em both before the world is much older.

The Human Value: Website | MySpace
Find a live review of The Human Value here, and photos here.

Love and a .45
Too Blonde For You

You hear that 'Pow, pow, pow' noise? That's the sound of Love and a .45 walloping you around the head with a veritable artillery barrage of punk rock anthems. The seven tracks here (er, does that make this release an EP? Or is it a rather short album?) are roaring monsters of hook 'n' chorus pop punk, the rampaging buzzsaw guitar barely taking a break from first song to last. Now, you might say, so what? There are plenty of bands doing the buzzsaw guitar thing, plenty of bands out there on the circuit kicking a nifty chorus or two about the place. Well, sure, but Love and a .45 do it head and shoulders better than most. The hooks grab your psyche, the guitar is like a swarm of hornets coming straight for your head. Vocalist Kate Moritz rips it up like she's got Brillo pads for vocal chords, and if the towering chorus on 'Sparks On The Water' doesn't have you thrusting your lighter in the air (tip: don't try this on public transport) then you must've had your ability to rock surgically removed. In short, it works. It's a glorious punker rampage with hooks and tunes to spare. One day I expect the music biz will discover this band, and they'll be hailed in the rock press as the new Distillers, or something. When that happens, remember who tipped Love and a .45 for the top first. Get on their case now: I think you might like these slices of fast 'n' dirty rock 'n' roll in a steamy embrace with classic pop songwriting.

Love and a .45: MySpace
Find a live review of Love and a .45 here, and photos here.

Susan Matthews
Hope-Bound (Sirenwire)

I don't know what her neighbours think, but I'm oddly reassured to know that this strangely compelling music is being made somewhere in the agreeable west Wales town of Kidwelly. (No, let's use the Welsh name - Cydweli - the English version sounds like something children wear in the rain). Either way, it's not a location I would have identified as a hot bed of left-field sonic singularity, but on this album Susan Matthews has put together a collection of out-there explorations in which ambience and narrative, found sounds and lost noises are somehow hauled together to make something that will stir the thoughts inside your head even as it flicks you round the ear.

'A Decoy Performance' is a deceptive faux-live spoken word piece (at least, I assume the sudden bursts of clapping are not a genuine audience: the applause is used as a sound) which matches gamelan-style clangs and bongs to a genuinely unsettling tale of an escalating man-on-woman fight, all the more disturbung because the voice of the female victim, telling the story, is so calm. She could be decribing the scenery outside her window. 'Veiled' is almost monstic in its haunting drift; a keening, plangent thing that almost sounds like old stonework singing. 'Seven Tears' has a shuddering violin riff (and yes, it is defintiely a riff: if it were an electric guitar we'd be rockin') around which a drum pattern that is more empty space than percussion fits itself. Wind instruments chatter like starlings in a tree, and a story is told in a voice that you can't quite hear. 'Missing' has that AM radio we heard a little earlier on the Colt EP above burbling and crackling away again - it's still not tuned in correctly - as a meticulous guitar picks and plucks. I'm struck by the odd thought that although Susan Matthews and Colt are probably coming in from different angles (Susan from the ambient experimental zone, Colt from rock 'n' roll) they are heading for some sort of metaphysical collision. Maybe they should listen to each other's music. 'A Dysfunctional Hush' is all disembodied voices, colliding and whispering and sounds hum and whirr, while 'Suffusion' could be mutant bluegrass, a gusting wind blowing the sound of a distant hoedown across the railway line from Pembroke Dock as the night gathers in. No, it's not rock 'n' roll - not even close - but these anomalous atmospheres have their own nerves-and-nightmares charm. I'm left with the thought that Susan Matthews is probably the coolest thing in Cydweli.

Susan Matthews : Website | MySpace

M.I.A. CD M.I.A.
Kala (XL)

I like M.I.A. for many reasons, not least the fact that she sounds just like she grew up listening to the John Peel show, and absorbed the whole bloody lot - from Throbbing Gristle to Misty In Roots, from New Order to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But, unlike many of the more unreconstructed Peelites, she didn't get outraged when Peelie started throwing in tunes by the likes of Eric B and Rakim. I don't know if any of that really happened, but her music sounds like it did. Influences pile in from all quarters: from hip-hop to punk, from dub to bhangra, and before you roll your eyes and declare all this a recipie for certain disaster, fear not. M.I.A. pulls it all together with an ease that is almost supernatural, sounding entirely at home as she strolls from the tribal rap-workout of 'Bird Flu' to the lilting Bollywood electropop of 'Jimmy'. Big props, as I believe the kids have it, to M.I.A.'s collaborator and producer Dave 'Switch' Taylor, who harnesses her wayward ideas and disparate inspirations, and nails it all to a production that has the depth-charge bass and hammering beats of vintage On-U Sound.

If we're talking influences, M.I.A. trawls the (post) punk zone quite extensively throughout the album. 'Bamboo Banga' contains chunks of Jonathan Richman's 'Roadrunner', matched to a rattling beat, and '20 Dollar' - a moody rap piece to a rumbling fuzz backing - mutates into 'Where Is My Mind? ' by the Pixies. The addictive lope of 'Paper Planes' is essentially a happy-slap of 'Straight To Hell' by The Clash, and also contains some neat-o firearms noises, slamming in as percussion effects, a trick first worked by Noblesse Oblige on their remix of M.I.A.'s earlier single, 'Galang'. Did she pick up that idea and run with it? I wouldn't be surprised. It's all an audacious mash-up, scattershot brilliance all the way, to the point where I bet I'll bet even unreconstructed rock heads will find themselves shaking their booties to the digeridoo groove of 'Mango Pickle Down River'.

One other rather random reason I like M.I.A. is that (Daily Mail readers, look away now) she sounds like London. In spite of all the publicity guff about how she comes from Sri Lanka, in fact she was born in the not particularly exotic environs of the same part of west London that I call home. And she sounds like it. Her accent is pure West London Desi Diva - there are people talking like that right outside my house at this moment. Probably. Morrissey would be scandalised, but musically and geographically, M.I.A. sounds like home to me.

M.I.A.: Website | MySpace

Colt
You Hold On To What's Not Real (Obvious)

A new EP, on the band's own label, and as ever Colt strip the insulation from your nerves with velvet wirecutters. The eight tracks here (four songs, four remixes) are treacherously temperate, disguising their inner storms behind a deceptive delicacy, pacing like cats that are getting ready to pounce. But Colt's ability to bring unsettling tension to songs which, on a first listen, are things of tender grace, is their trademark and the heart of their art. Now that Colt have reduced themselves to the essential duo of Andrea Kerr and Jared Hawkes, the music has gained a stripped-down focus that pulls you in even as it makes you glance nervously over your shoulder. The sudden outpourings of fractured guitar which shouldered their way into Colt's music in the past are here replaced by a kind of poison-cocktail jazz: here, Colt conjure quieter demons that are no less deliciously pernicious.

'DNA' is a slo-mo rumble, Andrea's vocal dragging against an electronic pulse as if every step is a haul through treacle. It sounds like the last thing you hear before the lights go out. On 'Snakes To Dust', a kind of anti-love song that brings a combination of regret and menace to crumping piano and electrical interference, has Andrea lamenting over a fellow human being, the lyrics full of images of ending: 'Close the door/The flowers will dry up...' On 'Black Rabbits', Colt conjure up a 'death toll like a lottery jackpot' as the music dawdles with sinister intent behind the vocal, like teenagers intent on crimes waiting until the coast is clear, while 'Static' almost has the whimsical, wistful, feel of one of Ivor Cutler's harmonium-backed poetry pieces (now there's a comparison I bet Colt never expected), as the keyboards hum and surge, as desolate as if the band was locked in a lonely chapel on a mountain. The remixes pick up Colt's ideas and reshape them into even stranger things: 'Static (League Against Economic Growth Mix)' sounds like AM radio on a night when there's a low cloud base, all shrieks and stutters and half-heard sounds from elsewhere. It's not easy listening, but it's worth tuning in.

Colt: MySpace

Shriekback CD Shriekback
Glory Bumps (Malicious Damage)

Ah, Shriekback: post-punk supergroup, originally assembled from ex-members of the Gang Of Four and XTC: lengthy and chequered career that encompassed alternoscene success but no big chart action: creators of the bug-eyed anthem 'Nemesis' which is referenced in the title of this very webzine. That's the (very) potted biography, but it may come as a surprise to many of Shriekback's old-skool fans that the Shriek-monster is still alive and kicking. After the band's swift exit from their major label after 1990's wannabe-commercial album Go Bang resulted in a distinct absence of hits, Shriekback decamped back to the independent zone where the band has maintained an erratic presence ever since. Today, Shriekback exists as a motley assortment of contributors and collaborators revolving around keyboard maestro, vocalist, and founder member Barry Andrews. On this album the cast includes long-time Shriekpeople Martyn Barker on drums, and Sarah Partridge on backing vocals. Barry's old XTC mucker, Andy Partridge, shows up on guitar, but I think it's fair to say that this is very much Barry's album. It's certainly weird enough.

In the world of Shriekback, of course, weird is good. The brash anthem of incorrigible optimism that is 'Hooray for Everything' - a tune with a manic grin pasted on its face if ever I heard one - gives way to the sepulchral grind-funk of 'The Bride Stripped Bare', in which Barry Andrews, singing with gravelly authority, informs us of 'Her armature/Forged in the Ruhr/Where all is flames and vapour'. Nope, I don't know what that's all about, either. Barry's lyrics are, as ever, weighty with strange portents and yet as oblique as slanting rain. He skates a course between glowering drama and endearing daftness - as on 'Burying the Bunny', a surrealist New Orleans funeral march, upon which he intones 'She looks so fluffy lying there/Wearing her grandmother's earrings, a gardenia in her hair'. Whereupon the trombone (yes, the trombone) picks a fight with the skittering guitar, and we know we could only be in the presence of Shriekback. Meanwhile, 'Amaryllis In The Sprawl' is one of those drifting, whimsical ballads that have cropped up in the Shriekback repertoire since forever. Here, Barry entwines the mystical and the everyday, taking us 'Out around the ring road in the falling dark/Between the heritage centre and the business park' - and, somehow, the mundane scenery of identikit British towns takes on a metaphysical glow. As ever, Shriekback allow the weirdness of the world to leak through, and set it dancing to their own strange funk.

Shriekback: Website | MySpace

London After Midnight
Violent Acts Of Beauty (Metropolis)

About time, too. I remember this album being billed as 'coming soon' way back in the last century - it's taken years on end for London After Midnight to follow up the 90s success of their previous albums, Selected Scenes From The End Of The World and Psycho Magnet. It's not like the band entirely vanished during those years, mind: live appearances, mainly at European festivals, have cropped up fairly regularly, and vocalist and main man Sean Brennan has always kept the band's profile high on the internet - in fact, he's become quite a genius at keeping the pot boiling on the web during lengthy periods in which very little was happening in the real world. But the one thing everyone was waiting for was the new album. And here it is. At last.

So, is it the no-shit blockbuster we might expct after such a lengthy gestation? Well...not quite. A note in the small print tells me 'All music and lyrics written, produced, programmed and performed by Sean Brennan' - with a few other names, including ex-Nitzer Ebb man Julian Beeston, credited with additional programming, mixing and instrumental contributions. The trouble is, it sounds like that. I don't get the impression, the feeling, of a full band kicking out the jams in the studio: on the contrary, the image which looms inexorably in my head is of Sean Brennan sitting in front of a computer, moving bits of virtual music around on his monitor screen. The result is a kind of ersatz industrio-rock, in which a vaguely Trent Reznor-ish vocal - you know, that menacing half chant, half whisper that became the industry standard vocal style for 90s industrial bands - fights it out with top-floor-of-the-Slimelight beatz.

'The Beginning Of The End' and 'Feeling Fascist?' sound like industrial club floor-fillers circa 1998, all terse elektro rhythms with Sean enunciating the words with stern assertiveness. 'Nothing's Sacred' is more of a song, and indeed is a rare example on this album of a tune that bears a discernible relationship to the sound of 'old' London After Midnight. But it's all boogied-up with one of VNV Nation's cast-off beats, with the vocals and guitars dropped back in the mix, as if nothing can be permitted to get in the way of the dancefloor action. 'America's A F***ing Disease' (that's how the title is given: what can it mean? America's a Fishing Disease? Oh, silly me: it's Fucking, a word which seems to be too scary for LAM to print) contains some incongruous but nifty Jethro Tull-style flute, which does actually lift the song above the industrial norm. 'Fear' rinses out the breakbeats - not, it must be said, a new idea: industrial bands like Cubanate and Project Pitchfork went down the breakbeat route years ago - but the guitars rock hard and it all hangs together. 'Pure' and 'Love You To Death' are techno ballads, melodrama and programming in equal measures, but aside from these interludes it's pretty much industrio-beatz 'n' angst all the way.

I suspect that if this album had appeared in the late 90s, as originally scheduled, it would've seemed like cutting edge stuff. That was the time when the rise of NIN nudged many goth bands into a reappraisal of their approach, and more than a few chose to explore industrial territory - the classic example, I suppose, being Rosetta Stone, who switched their primary influence from Andrew Eldrtich to Trent Reznor almost overnight. But now, as the twenty-first century unfolds before us, it all sounds a bit been-there-done-that. Violent Acts Of Beauty isn't a bad album. It's just arrived a bit late.

London After Midnight: Website | MySpace

What The Folk CD Various Artists
What The Folk Volume 2 (Butterfly)

Now, this might come as a surprise, but when Youth isn't playing bass for Vertical Smile or Killing Joke, and when he's not locked in a studio producing some random megastar's latest album, he's a bit of a folk-head, putting out compilations of current artists from the folk zone (or perhaps I should say the folk field, since pastoral is big in these circles) on his own label. Here's the latest, and before you run screaming to the nearest source of rock 'n' roll, let me assure you that things are sharply contemporary here, without a hey or a ho or indeed a nonny no in sight. Instead, there's the strolling, bass-driven menace of 'Tyburn Tree' by The Leifs, upon which dub reggae influences and scratchy wah-wah guitar drag this traditional song into three kinds of future at once. Nic Dawson Kelly's 'Come Around My Dear' is the skirt-chasing song of a querulous old roué, with a turn of phrase in the lyric that is almost Beefheartian: 'If I'm lonely on the outside, inside I've disappeared'. Brushed drums pirouette behind 'As I Rolled My Rolling Ball', a whimsical tale of passing princes and duckponds by Samantha Maris, a nod in the direction of the time-honoured tradition of recounting a fairy tale in song, but the showstopper has to be 'Always Tomorrow' by Chapel Of Dreams. This is one of those pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-down songs which I suppose are almost a tradition in themselves - but here, the female vocalist, recorded so close to the microphone she's almost in the room with you, delivers as an iridescent, ethereal lullaby that will tug your heartstrings even as it puts iron in your soul. Rock 'n' rollers have no need to fret. This diverse and engaging collection contains music that will tempt even the most unreconstructed folkaphobe.

Butterfly Recordings: Website

Cockatoo
The Basement Tapes (Self release)

As inviting as a swimming pool on a hot day, Cockatoo make fluid dreampop that shifts and shimmers like water in sunshine. This release, with its rather baffling sleeve artwork (statuary, dripping blood, obsolescent audio kit, and a title filched off Bob Dylan - not much shimmering or sunshine there) is a five-song calling card intended to warm things up for a forthcoming album. The songs are nudged along with insistent grace by the spike and chime of Robyn Bright's twelve-string guitar, her vocals swirling with the music like she's swimming with dolphins. But it's not all ambience and atmosphere: everything is underpinned by a rhythm that always makes its presence felt, without ever fighting against the flow. Indeed, on 'Otto's Song' the bass shadows the tune like a big brother, putting a beefy rumble behind the clang and coruscation of the guitar as the vocal surges ever onwards. This use of rhythm gives Cockatoo's music a deceptively fierce heart, even as it smiles sweetly at the listener through the dust dancing in shafts of sunlight. 'White Picket Fence' is built on an urgent yet relaxed clatter of drums, and a vocal that builds and roils on waves of guitar, the production always giving the music space to billow and surge. Yes, it's dreampop, but it's not afraid to tweak the curtains and let the nightmares look in. Cockatoo's inviting, shimmering swimming pool is deeper than it looks.

Cockatoo: Website | MySpace

Andi Sex Gang CD Andi Sex Gang
Inventing New Destruction (Pink Noise)

If Andi Sex Gang lives to be a hundred, he'll be known - and, in some quarters, revered - as a pioneer of goth. As the fulcrum around which proto-goth freakers and shriekers Sex Gang Children revolved (and, indeed, still revolve), he was one of the handful of artists in the early 80s post-punk era to wrench things in a darker, weirder direction. To this day, he can command an audience of eager and respectful goths and deathrockers, keen to hear the old classics. Which is all well and good, but sometimes I wish people would pay a bit more attention to Andi Sex Gang's new classics. Starting with this very album: a collection of idiosyncratic art rock, surreal beat poetry and sonic theatre that defies genre even as it prods the listener with mischivious fingers and cackles knowingly as it runs off in all directions at once.

The rampaging psychedelic pop extravaganza that is 'Celebrate!' ('Beauty queens and killers galore, contageous and outrageous!' - hey, sounds like quite a party) gives way to the crump and rumble of 'King Richard In The Heartland', a song that lumbers towards the listener like a cartload of tree trunks, heavy and implacable, the lyrics warning of...something. As ever, Andi's lyrics are ambiguous but oddly compelling: 'Bananas in Bengal, Magnolia in Montreal, the holiday is over for you all.' Well, that's us told. The hum and fizzle of 'Into The West', all Throbbing Gristle-ish ambience and strange declaimations on a theme of Berlin, sounds like gathering clouds before an electrical storm. 'Rhineland Barbie' is a funeral march disguised as a sea shanty. The song goes lurching and lolloping along like a drunk in the gutter, gesticulating at lamp posts while a choir of doom angels keen and grumble in the background, finally consenting to join in on the final chorus: 'Death on the salty waves...' Suddenly, an accordion wheezes out 'Summertime' as random clonks and bangs occur in the background: this is 'Optidog', not so much a song as an exercise in assembling sound. It's as if someone's held a microphone out of the window and recorded the neighbours, griping and fumbling in their garden shed. In short, we're a long, long way from dear old gothic rock, and the scenery is decidedly strange. But it's a trip worth taking.

Andi Sex Gang: Website | MySpace
Find a review of Andi Sex Gang's performance at the Drop Dead Festival here, and photos here.

999
Death in Soho (Overground)

I know what you're going to say. '999? Are they still going?' Yep, they certainly are - possibly the only original-wave punk band to have simply carried on. No splits, no reformations, and only a couple of replacement bassists along the way. The glory years of sell-out gigs at theatre venues such as London's Lyceum, and bug-eyed punker-pop anthems such as the splendidly manic 'Found Out Too Late' are a long way behind the lads now, but still they continue. And, to their credit, since they could probably play the punk nostalgia circuit for years yet on the back of the old stuff, 999 are still releasing new material. Expectations should be adjusted somewhat downwards, mind. The dense, insistent sound of the band's early recordings has been replaced by a raw and basic back-room-of-a-pub racket, possibly a function of a shoestring production budget, while Nick Cash's vocal is a terse bark rather than the crazed caterwaul of ye olden days - possibly a function of the inexorably advancing years. This means that although all the songs here are written and arranged with suitable levels of strop and strut, the overall effect is more chunky than punky. The band gamely try for the original spirit, which, alas, results in a certain punk-by-numbers feel in places - 'The System' contains lyrics which are almost embarassing in their artless contrivance: 'Working for the system in your head/Some will say you're better off dead'. Read 'em and cringe, folks. It's perhaps revealing that 999 sound much more at home on 'Stealing Beauty', an unpretentiously fast and catchy powerpop ditty which makes no claim to any countercultural stance. 999's loyalty to the punk cause may be the factor that has ensured the survival of the band, but it's hard not to notice the limitations it's imposed on them, too.

999: Website

Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward (XL)

Fifteen tracks of smash-and-grab bubblegum from the most famous (and possibly the only) punk band from Nashville, Tennessee. You might recall the huge initial wallop Be Your Own Pet made with their first single, the taut and righteous 'Damn Damn Leash', and the following debut album of short, sharp, punker shocks. Now it's Difficult Second Album time, and it seems the Pets have adopted the strategy of not fixing it if it ain't broke. There they are on the sleeve, as colourful as a packet of licorice allsorts, looking like a Hanna Barbera cartoon come to life, and inside the CD sleeve we find throwaway interviews with each member of the band - sample question: 'What's your favourite pizza topping?' (You'll be fascinated to know that vocalist Jemina favours pepperoni and jalapenos). So, no heavy concepts, no self-conscious maturity: it's all as fast and as fun as ever. The songs crash and rattle, the guitar grinds and wails. At times, the sound is reminiscient of a young and snotty White Stripes: sure, Be Your Own Pet! might be a punk band, but you can hear the lineage of American rock 'n' roll, from blues to glam and back again, in their sound. 'Bitches Leave' even has a distinctly rawk guitar solo. Best song has to be the teenage murder epic, 'Becky', in which the band stretch things out into a one-song rampage through their very own High School musical - and the lyrics gleefully rhyme 'Friendship bracelet' with 'Break your facelift'. Just for that audacious bit of poesy, you've gotta love 'em, right? Even if your schooldays are way behind you, I bet you'll be joining in on the shouty chorus as teen angst rises unbidden in your psyche: 'WE DON'T LIKE THAT KID ANY MORE!' What Be Your Own Pet do is not complicated stuff, for sure, but it has a cacophonous charm.

Be Your Own Pet: Website | MySpace


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The CD reviews for issue 5 continue here. This is the second of two reviews pages. Click here to go back to the first page - but not before you've read the reviews below! PJ Harvey White Chalk (Island) I must admit I have approaced PJ Harvey with caution ever since her last-but-one album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, turned out to be a bit too AOR for comfort. In fact, I recall an interview in which Polly Harvey herself admitted that things got a little too smooth and meticulous on that album - a point I wish she'd made before I bought the ruddy thing. Since then, however, her natural maverick spirit seems to have reasserted itself, and while this probably does not delight the execs at her record label, who have seen all hope of smash hit drivetime anthems vanish into the distance, it does mean that PJ Harvey fans like me can return to the fold, knowing things will be interesting. This album is certainly a return to tangental form, being a collection of faux-folk bacchanals, parlour-jazz ballads and romps, which, while always remaining primly respectable, nevertheless hint at storms below the surface. Perhaps it's Polly's severe white dress on the sleeve that puts the thought of distorted Victoriana into my mind, or perhaps it's the click and clunk of the piano which drives the songs, occupying the space where, if this were rock 'n' roll, the guitar would be. Its internal workings are faithfully recorded, along with every plangent note - 'Grow Grow Grow' is a lilting pean to the upward pull of life which could've been plucked from a music box; you can even hear the rumble and click as the recording machine is switched off at the end of the song. 'To Talk To You' is the bookend at the opposite end of the shelf of life, as Polly wishes her late grandmother were alive to give counsel; here, the piano laments emptily like the sound of a Sunday school on Monday morning. Reflective and introspective without ever being merely bleak, this music quietly fascinates. Drivetime anthems might occupy another world. PJ Harvey: Website \| MySpace The Human Value Push & Pull (Big Deal) Fresh from an extended foray around the UK gig circuit, this Los Angeles band has come up with a second album as immediate as a poke in the ribs, and yet with depth and subtlety, too. Not that I ever doubted them for a moment, but I'm happy to report that The Human Value's unerring new wave sensibilities are as sharp as ever. The songs here have just the right combination of nagging melodies and grit-in-the-gears rock 'n' roll roughness; everything is pulled along by the fizz and fuzz of Hiram's guitar and the tug and slide of Turu's after-dark vocals. But this album isn't just a re-tread of past glories. We know The Human Value can nail a nifty new wave number with uncanny ease; we know the band can balance effortlessly on the point where melody meets cacophony. That's what they do. But here, they go further. On this go-around, the sound overall is a little more lush and well-upholstered; the arrangements have a wide-screen scope; the sound rolls out like thunderclouds. 'Pleasant Town' kicks things off with a phat, phuzztone guitar sound, as Turu casts a baleful eye (and a deliciously drawling vocal) over the picket fence. 'Pretty Mouth' sees massed guitars fighting it out with the plonk-plonk of a cowbell on a no-shit punk rocker (the cowbell almost wins), and suitable levels of bile and brimstone are maintained on 'No Sacrifice', which marries the downhome grind of the riff to a kick-it-up chorus. A couple of older numbers crop up in re-recorded guise, and I think you're going to like the way 'Complications' (here identified as 'No. 2') has grown into a menacing, rumbling monster, all pounding and growling (big props here to James Hazley on the drums, by the way), while 'Parts' ('Parts Per Million', as was) tumbles along as if it's just been pushed off a steep hill. The live showstopper 'I Don't Care' is here, too, building from its deceptively neat and tidy intro to a veritable freakathon of angst and snarling guitars. If you already have the band's first album, you'll be glad to know that this one shoves it all onwards and upwards. If you don't have the band's first album, be sure to buy 'em both before the world is much older. The Human Value: Website \| MySpace Find a live review of The Human Value here, and photos here. Love and a .45 Too Blonde For You You hear that 'Pow, pow, pow' noise? That's the sound of Love and a .45 walloping you around the head with a veritable artillery barrage of punk rock anthems. The seven tracks here (er, does that make this release an EP? Or is it a rather short album?) are roaring monsters of hook 'n' chorus pop punk, the rampaging buzzsaw guitar barely taking a break from first song to last. Now, you might say, so what? There are plenty of bands doing the buzzsaw guitar thing, plenty of bands out there on the circuit kicking a nifty chorus or two about the place. Well, sure, but Love and a .45 do it head and shoulders better than most. The hooks grab your psyche, the guitar is like a swarm of hornets coming straight for your head. Vocalist Kate Moritz rips it up like she's got Brillo pads for vocal chords, and if the towering chorus on 'Sparks On The Water' doesn't have you thrusting your lighter in the air (tip: don't try this on public transport) then you must've had your ability to rock surgically removed. In short, it works. It's a glorious punker rampage with hooks and tunes to spare. One day I expect the music biz will discover this band, and they'll be hailed in the rock press as the new Distillers, or something. When that happens, remember who tipped Love and a .45 for the top first. Get on their case now: I think you might like these slices of fast 'n' dirty rock 'n' roll in a steamy embrace with classic pop songwriting. Love and a .45: MySpace Find a live review of Love and a .45 here, and photos here. Susan Matthews Hope-Bound (Sirenwire) I don't know what her neighbours think, but I'm oddly reassured to know that this strangely compelling music is being made somewhere in the agreeable west Wales town of Kidwelly. (No, let's use the Welsh name - Cydweli - the English version sounds like something children wear in the rain). Either way, it's not a location I would have identified as a hot bed of left-field sonic singularity, but on this album Susan Matthews has put together a collection of out-there explorations in which ambience and narrative, found sounds and lost noises are somehow hauled together to make something that will stir the thoughts inside your head even as it flicks you round the ear. 'A Decoy Performance' is a deceptive faux-live spoken word piece (at least, I assume the sudden bursts of clapping are not a genuine audience: the applause is used as a sound) which matches gamelan-style clangs and bongs to a genuinely unsettling tale of an escalating man-on-woman fight, all the more disturbung because the voice of the female victim, telling the story, is so calm. She could be decribing the scenery outside her window. 'Veiled' is almost monstic in its haunting drift; a keening, plangent thing that almost sounds like old stonework singing. 'Seven Tears' has a shuddering violin riff (and yes, it is defintiely a riff: if it were an electric guitar we'd be rockin') around which a drum pattern that is more empty space than percussion fits itself. Wind instruments chatter like starlings in a tree, and a story is told in a voice that you can't quite hear. 'Missing' has that AM radio we heard a little earlier on the Colt EP above burbling and crackling away again - it's still not tuned in correctly - as a meticulous guitar picks and plucks. I'm struck by the odd thought that although Susan Matthews and Colt are probably coming in from different angles (Susan from the ambient experimental zone, Colt from rock 'n' roll) they are heading for some sort of metaphysical collision. Maybe they should listen to each other's music. 'A Dysfunctional Hush' is all disembodied voices, colliding and whispering and sounds hum and whirr, while 'Suffusion' could be mutant bluegrass, a gusting wind blowing the sound of a distant hoedown across the railway line from Pembroke Dock as the night gathers in. No, it's not rock 'n' roll - not even close - but these anomalous atmospheres have their own nerves-and-nightmares charm. I'm left with the thought that Susan Matthews is probably the coolest thing in Cydweli. Susan Matthews : Website \| MySpace M.I.A. Kala (XL) I like M.I.A. for many reasons, not least the fact that she sounds just like she grew up listening to the John Peel show, and absorbed the whole bloody lot - from Throbbing Gristle to Misty In Roots, from New Order to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But, unlike many of the more unreconstructed Peelites, she didn't get outraged when Peelie started throwing in tunes by the likes of Eric B and Rakim. I don't know if any of that really happened, but her music sounds like it did. Influences pile in from all quarters: from hip-hop to punk, from dub to bhangra, and before you roll your eyes and declare all this a recipie for certain disaster, fear not. M.I.A. pulls it all together with an ease that is almost supernatural, sounding entirely at home as she strolls from the tribal rap-workout of 'Bird Flu' to the lilting Bollywood electropop of 'Jimmy'. Big props, as I believe the kids have it, to M.I.A.'s collaborator and producer Dave 'Switch' Taylor, who harnesses her wayward ideas and disparate inspirations, and nails it all to a production that has the depth-charge bass and hammering beats of vintage On-U Sound. If we're talking influences, M.I.A. trawls the (post) punk zone quite extensively throughout the album. 'Bamboo Banga' contains chunks of Jonathan Richman's 'Roadrunner', matched to a rattling beat, and '20 Dollar' - a moody rap piece to a rumbling fuzz backing - mutates into 'Where Is My Mind? ' by the Pixies. The addictive lope of 'Paper Planes' is essentially a happy-slap of 'Straight To Hell' by The Clash, and also contains some neat-o firearms noises, slamming in as percussion effects, a trick first worked by Noblesse Oblige on their remix of M.I.A.'s earlier single, 'Galang'. Did she pick up that idea and run with it? I wouldn't be surprised. It's all an audacious mash-up, scattershot brilliance all the way, to the point where I bet I'll bet even unreconstructed rock heads will find themselves shaking their booties to the digeridoo groove of 'Mango Pickle Down River'. One other rather random reason I like M.I.A. is that (Daily Mail readers, look away now) she sounds like London. In spite of all the publicity guff about how she comes from Sri Lanka, in fact she was born in the not particularly exotic environs of the same part of west London that I call home. And she sounds like it. Her accent is pure West London Desi Diva - there are people talking like that right outside my house at this moment. Probably. Morrissey would be scandalised, but musically and geographically, M.I.A. sounds like home to me. M.I.A.: Website \| MySpace Colt You Hold On To What's Not Real (Obvious) A new EP, on the band's own label, and as ever Colt strip the insulation from your nerves with velvet wirecutters. The eight tracks here (four songs, four remixes) are treacherously temperate, disguising their inner storms behind a deceptive delicacy, pacing like cats that are getting ready to pounce. But Colt's ability to bring unsettling tension to songs which, on a first listen, are things of tender grace, is their trademark and the heart of their art. Now that Colt have reduced themselves to the essential duo of Andrea Kerr and Jared Hawkes, the music has gained a stripped-down focus that pulls you in even as it makes you glance nervously over your shoulder. The sudden outpourings of fractured guitar which shouldered their way into Colt's music in the past are here replaced by a kind of poison-cocktail jazz: here, Colt conjure quieter demons that are no less deliciously pernicious. 'DNA' is a slo-mo rumble, Andrea's vocal dragging against an electronic pulse as if every step is a haul through treacle. It sounds like the last thing you hear before the lights go out. On 'Snakes To Dust', a kind of anti-love song that brings a combination of regret and menace to crumping piano and electrical interference, has Andrea lamenting over a fellow human being, the lyrics full of images of ending: 'Close the door/The flowers will dry up...' On 'Black Rabbits', Colt conjure up a 'death toll like a lottery jackpot' as the music dawdles with sinister intent behind the vocal, like teenagers intent on crimes waiting until the coast is clear, while 'Static' almost has the whimsical, wistful, feel of one of Ivor Cutler's harmonium-backed poetry pieces (now there's a comparison I bet Colt never expected), as the keyboards hum and surge, as desolate as if the band was locked in a lonely chapel on a mountain. The remixes pick up Colt's ideas and reshape them into even stranger things: 'Static (League Against Economic Growth Mix)' sounds like AM radio on a night when there's a low cloud base, all shrieks and stutters and half-heard sounds from elsewhere. It's not easy listening, but it's worth tuning in. Colt: MySpace Shriekback Glory Bumps (Malicious Damage) Ah, Shriekback: post-punk supergroup, originally assembled from ex-members of the Gang Of Four and XTC: lengthy and chequered career that encompassed alternoscene success but no big chart action: creators of the bug-eyed anthem 'Nemesis' which is referenced in the title of this very webzine. That's the (very) potted biography, but it may come as a surprise to many of Shriekback's old-skool fans that the Shriek-monster is still alive and kicking. After the band's swift exit from their major label after 1990's wannabe-commercial album Go Bang resulted in a distinct absence of hits, Shriekback decamped back to the independent zone where the band has maintained an erratic presence ever since. Today, Shriekback exists as a motley assortment of contributors and collaborators revolving around keyboard maestro, vocalist, and founder member Barry Andrews. On this album the cast includes long-time Shriekpeople Martyn Barker on drums, and Sarah Partridge on backing vocals. Barry's old XTC mucker, Andy Partridge, shows up on guitar, but I think it's fair to say that this is very much Barry's album. It's certainly weird enough. In the world of Shriekback, of course, weird is good. The brash anthem of incorrigible optimism that is 'Hooray for Everything' - a tune with a manic grin pasted on its face if ever I heard one - gives way to the sepulchral grind-funk of 'The Bride Stripped Bare', in which Barry Andrews, singing with gravelly authority, informs us of 'Her armature/Forged in the Ruhr/Where all is flames and vapour'. Nope, I don't know what that's all about, either. Barry's lyrics are, as ever, weighty with strange portents and yet as oblique as slanting rain. He skates a course between glowering drama and endearing daftness - as on 'Burying the Bunny', a surrealist New Orleans funeral march, upon which he intones 'She looks so fluffy lying there/Wearing her grandmother's earrings, a gardenia in her hair'. Whereupon the trombone (yes, the trombone) picks a fight with the skittering guitar, and we know we could only be in the presence of Shriekback. Meanwhile, 'Amaryllis In The Sprawl' is one of those drifting, whimsical ballads that have cropped up in the Shriekback repertoire since forever. Here, Barry entwines the mystical and the everyday, taking us 'Out around the ring road in the falling dark/Between the heritage centre and the business park' - and, somehow, the mundane scenery of identikit British towns takes on a metaphysical glow. As ever, Shriekback allow the weirdness of the world to leak through, and set it dancing to their own strange funk. Shriekback: Website \| MySpace London After Midnight Violent Acts Of Beauty (Metropolis) About time, too. I remember this album being billed as 'coming soon' way back in the last century - it's taken years on end for London After Midnight to follow up the 90s success of their previous albums, Selected Scenes From The End Of The World and Psycho Magnet. It's not like the band entirely vanished during those years, mind: live appearances, mainly at European festivals, have cropped up fairly regularly, and vocalist and main man Sean Brennan has always kept the band's profile high on the internet - in fact, he's become quite a genius at keeping the pot boiling on the web during lengthy periods in which very little was happening in the real world. But the one thing everyone was waiting for was the new album. And here it is. At last. So, is it the no-shit blockbuster we might expct after such a lengthy gestation? Well...not quite. A note in the small print tells me 'All music and lyrics written, produced, programmed and performed by Sean Brennan' - with a few other names, including ex-Nitzer Ebb man Julian Beeston, credited with additional programming, mixing and instrumental contributions. The trouble is, it sounds like that. I don't get the impression, the feeling, of a full band kicking out the jams in the studio: on the contrary, the image which looms inexorably in my head is of Sean Brennan sitting in front of a computer, moving bits of virtual music around on his monitor screen. The result is a kind of ersatz industrio-rock, in which a vaguely Trent Reznor-ish vocal - you know, that menacing half chant, half whisper that became the industry standard vocal style for 90s industrial bands - fights it out with top-floor-of-the-Slimelight beatz. 'The Beginning Of The End' and 'Feeling Fascist?' sound like industrial club floor-fillers circa 1998, all terse elektro rhythms with Sean enunciating the words with stern assertiveness. 'Nothing's Sacred' is more of a song, and indeed is a rare example on this album of a tune that bears a discernible relationship to the sound of 'old' London After Midnight. But it's all boogied-up with one of VNV Nation's cast-off beats, with the vocals and guitars dropped back in the mix, as if nothing can be permitted to get in the way of the dancefloor action. 'America's A F**ing Disease' (that's how the title is given: what can it mean? America's a Fishing* Disease? Oh, silly me: it's Fucking, a word which seems to be too scary for LAM to print) contains some incongruous but nifty Jethro Tull-style flute, which does actually lift the song above the industrial norm. 'Fear' rinses out the breakbeats - not, it must be said, a new idea: industrial bands like Cubanate and Project Pitchfork went down the breakbeat route years ago - but the guitars rock hard and it all hangs together. 'Pure' and 'Love You To Death' are techno ballads, melodrama and programming in equal measures, but aside from these interludes it's pretty much industrio-beatz 'n' angst all the way. I suspect that if this album had appeared in the late 90s, as originally scheduled, it would've seemed like cutting edge stuff. That was the time when the rise of NIN nudged many goth bands into a reappraisal of their approach, and more than a few chose to explore industrial territory - the classic example, I suppose, being Rosetta Stone, who switched their primary influence from Andrew Eldrtich to Trent Reznor almost overnight. But now, as the twenty-first century unfolds before us, it all sounds a bit been-there-done-that. Violent Acts Of Beauty isn't a bad album. It's just arrived a bit late. London After Midnight: Website \| MySpace Various Artists What The Folk Volume 2 (Butterfly) Now, this might come as a surprise, but when Youth isn't playing bass for Vertical Smile or Killing Joke, and when he's not locked in a studio producing some random megastar's latest album, he's a bit of a folk-head, putting out compilations of current artists from the folk zone (or perhaps I should say the folk field, since pastoral is big in these circles) on his own label. Here's the latest, and before you run screaming to the nearest source of rock 'n' roll, let me assure you that things are sharply contemporary here, without a hey or a ho or indeed a nonny no in sight. Instead, there's the strolling, bass-driven menace of 'Tyburn Tree' by The Leifs, upon which dub reggae influences and scratchy wah-wah guitar drag this traditional song into three kinds of future at once. Nic Dawson Kelly's 'Come Around My Dear' is the skirt-chasing song of a querulous old roué, with a turn of phrase in the lyric that is almost Beefheartian: 'If I'm lonely on the outside, inside I've disappeared'. Brushed drums pirouette behind 'As I Rolled My Rolling Ball', a whimsical tale of passing princes and duckponds by Samantha Maris, a nod in the direction of the time-honoured tradition of recounting a fairy tale in song, but the showstopper has to be 'Always Tomorrow' by Chapel Of Dreams. This is one of those pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-down songs which I suppose are almost a tradition in themselves - but here, the female vocalist, recorded so close to the microphone she's almost in the room with you, delivers as an iridescent, ethereal lullaby that will tug your heartstrings even as it puts iron in your soul. Rock 'n' rollers have no need to fret. This diverse and engaging collection contains music that will tempt even the most unreconstructed folkaphobe. Butterfly Recordings: Website Cockatoo The Basement Tapes (Self release) As inviting as a swimming pool on a hot day, Cockatoo make fluid dreampop that shifts and shimmers like water in sunshine. This release, with its rather baffling sleeve artwork (statuary, dripping blood, obsolescent audio kit, and a title filched off Bob Dylan - not much shimmering or sunshine there) is a five-song calling card intended to warm things up for a forthcoming album. The songs are nudged along with insistent grace by the spike and chime of Robyn Bright's twelve-string guitar, her vocals swirling with the music like she's swimming with dolphins. But it's not all ambience and atmosphere: everything is underpinned by a rhythm that always makes its presence felt, without ever fighting against the flow. Indeed, on 'Otto's Song' the bass shadows the tune like a big brother, putting a beefy rumble behind the clang and coruscation of the guitar as the vocal surges ever onwards. This use of rhythm gives Cockatoo's music a deceptively fierce heart, even as it smiles sweetly at the listener through the dust dancing in shafts of sunlight. 'White Picket Fence' is built on an urgent yet relaxed clatter of drums, and a vocal that builds and roils on waves of guitar, the production always giving the music space to billow and surge. Yes, it's dreampop, but it's not afraid to tweak the curtains and let the nightmares look in. Cockatoo's inviting, shimmering swimming pool is deeper than it looks. Cockatoo: Website \| MySpace Andi Sex Gang Inventing New Destruction (Pink Noise) If Andi Sex Gang lives to be a hundred, he'll be known - and, in some quarters, revered - as a pioneer of goth. As the fulcrum around which proto-goth freakers and shriekers Sex Gang Children revolved (and, indeed, still revolve), he was one of the handful of artists in the early 80s post-punk era to wrench things in a darker, weirder direction. To this day, he can command an audience of eager and respectful goths and deathrockers, keen to hear the old classics. Which is all well and good, but sometimes I wish people would pay a bit more attention to Andi Sex Gang's new classics. Starting with this very album: a collection of idiosyncratic art rock, surreal beat poetry and sonic theatre that defies genre even as it prods the listener with mischivious fingers and cackles knowingly as it runs off in all directions at once. The rampaging psychedelic pop extravaganza that is 'Celebrate!' ('Beauty queens and killers galore, contageous and outrageous!' - hey, sounds like quite a party) gives way to the crump and rumble of 'King Richard In The Heartland', a song that lumbers towards the listener like a cartload of tree trunks, heavy and implacable, the lyrics warning of...something. As ever, Andi's lyrics are ambiguous but oddly compelling: 'Bananas in Bengal, Magnolia in Montreal, the holiday is over for you all.' Well, that's us told. The hum and fizzle of 'Into The West', all Throbbing Gristle-ish ambience and strange declaimations on a theme of Berlin, sounds like gathering clouds before an electrical storm. 'Rhineland Barbie' is a funeral march disguised as a sea shanty. The song goes lurching and lolloping along like a drunk in the gutter, gesticulating at lamp posts while a choir of doom angels keen and grumble in the background, finally consenting to join in on the final chorus: 'Death on the salty waves...' Suddenly, an accordion wheezes out 'Summertime' as random clonks and bangs occur in the background: this is 'Optidog', not so much a song as an exercise in assembling sound. It's as if someone's held a microphone out of the window and recorded the neighbours, griping and fumbling in their garden shed. In short, we're a long, long way from dear old gothic rock, and the scenery is decidedly strange. But it's a trip worth taking. Andi Sex Gang: Website \| MySpace Find a review of Andi Sex Gang's performance at the Drop Dead Festival here, and photos here. 999 Death in Soho (Overground) I know what you're going to say. '999? Are they still going?' Yep, they certainly are - possibly the only original-wave punk band to have simply carried on. No splits, no reformations, and only a couple of replacement bassists along the way. The glory years of sell-out gigs at theatre venues such as London's Lyceum, and bug-eyed punker-pop anthems such as the splendidly manic 'Found Out Too Late' are a long way behind the lads now, but still they continue. And, to their credit, since they could probably play the punk nostalgia circuit for years yet on the back of the old stuff, 999 are still releasing new material. Expectations should be adjusted somewhat downwards, mind. The dense, insistent sound of the band's early recordings has been replaced by a raw and basic back-room-of-a-pub racket, possibly a function of a shoestring production budget, while Nick Cash's vocal is a terse bark rather than the crazed caterwaul of ye olden days - possibly a function of the inexorably advancing years. This means that although all the songs here are written and arranged with suitable levels of strop and strut, the overall effect is more chunky than punky. The band gamely try for the original spirit, which, alas, results in a certain punk-by-numbers feel in places - 'The System' contains lyrics which are almost embarassing in their artless contrivance: 'Working for the system in your head/Some will say you're better off dead'. Read 'em and cringe, folks. It's perhaps revealing that 999 sound much more at home on 'Stealing Beauty', an unpretentiously fast and catchy powerpop ditty which makes no claim to any countercultural stance. 999's loyalty to the punk cause may be the factor that has ensured the survival of the band, but it's hard not to notice the limitations it's imposed on them, too. 999: Website Be Your Own Pet Get Awkward (XL) Fifteen tracks of smash-and-grab bubblegum from the most famous (and possibly the only) punk band from Nashville, Tennessee. You might recall the huge initial wallop Be Your Own Pet made with their first single, the taut and righteous 'Damn Damn Leash', and the following debut album of short, sharp, punker shocks. Now it's Difficult Second Album time, and it seems the Pets have adopted the strategy of not fixing it if it ain't broke. There they are on the sleeve, as colourful as a packet of licorice allsorts, looking like a Hanna Barbera cartoon come to life, and inside the CD sleeve we find throwaway interviews with each member of the band - sample question: 'What's your favourite pizza topping?' (You'll be fascinated to know that vocalist Jemina favours pepperoni and jalapenos). So, no heavy concepts, no self-conscious maturity: it's all as fast and as fun as ever. The songs crash and rattle, the guitar grinds and wails. At times, the sound is reminiscient of a young and snotty White Stripes: sure, Be Your Own Pet! might be a punk band, but you can hear the lineage of American rock 'n' roll, from blues to glam and back again, in their sound. 'Bitches Leave' even has a distinctly rawk guitar solo. Best song has to be the teenage murder epic, 'Becky', in which the band stretch things out into a one-song rampage through their very own High School musical - and the lyrics gleefully rhyme 'Friendship bracelet' with 'Break your facelift'. Just for that audacious bit of poesy, you've gotta love 'em, right? Even if your schooldays are way behind you, I bet you'll be joining in on the shouty chorus as teen angst rises unbidden in your psyche: 'WE DON'T LIKE THAT KID ANY MORE!' What Be Your Own Pet do is not complicated stuff, for sure, but it has a cacophonous charm. Be Your Own Pet: Website \| MySpace
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