"Everyone's gotta grow up,"
Jemina Pearl sings on
Mommy,
Be Your Own Pet's first album in 15 years. It's a subject she's well-versed in. When the band -- whose members were barely out of their teens -- imploded after 2008's
Get Awkward, it was partly due to exhausting major-label demands and partly because of the virulent misogyny
Pearl encountered. Though
Be Your Own Pet reunited, they didn't come back exactly as they were: times changed, and so did they. Originally, the band wrote the music first and
Pearl fit her lyrics around it; on
Mommy,
Pearl is running the show. As suggested by
Mommy's title and imagery, power is on her mind -- who wields it, how it was taken away from her, and how she's getting it back. Hearing her sing about mental health struggles on "Bad Mood Rising" ("It's like I got two personalities/One that hates you and one that hates me") instead of the bicycles, knife fights, and adventures that populated
Be Your Own Pet's first two albums is a jolting reminder of how much
Pearl has been through, but she's lost none of her electric immediacy as a frontwoman.
Mommy is most potent when she taps into her anger about being sexualized as a teenage rock star and sidelined and dismissed as a mother. It's a fascinating dual perspective that she explores on "Hand Grenade"'s revenge fantasies ("I'll be the reason you can't sleep in the middle of the night") and the motherly FOMO of "Goodtime!" ("Used to be the life of the party/Now I'm not so juvenile"). The reunited
Be Your Own Pet is just as critical of the world to which they returned. They skewer right-wing humiliation culture on "Worship the Whip" and connect sexism's dots on the searing "Big Trouble," which ties
Pearl's experiences to larger issues ("It's not in my head just cuz you don't seeâ?¦I want wages for housework/I want childcare for free"). Frequently, the album's lyrics are more revolutionary than its music. Back in the day,
BYOP's volatile songs had as much in common with bands like
Deerhoof as with
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. On
Mommy, their sound settles into a garage-meets-hard rock strut that shares more in common with
Amyl and the Sniffers and
Sheer Mag. Though their previous tangents are missed, they own "Pleasure Seeker"'s stomp and "Rubberist"'s razor-sharp disco-punk entirely. Shades of their adventurousness resurface on "Teenage Heaven." A riff on the teen death ballads of the '50s and '60s, it plays like a ghostly echo of their cult-favorite single "Becky" that's even more pointed given
Pearl's own traumatic adolescence.
Mommy may be the work of a more musically straightforward band, but its biggest and best surprise is that it exists at all. Hearing
Pearl reclaim her agency with an older, wiser, and hopefully more sustainable incarnation of
Be Your Own Pet is a thrill for fans old and new. ~ Heather Phares
