Be Your Own Pet plays its frenetic punk like it's new

Be Your Own Pet
With the Black Lips
At: the Middle East, Saturday night

CAMBRIDGE -- Three days, 30 venues, 300 bands, reads the NEMO music conference banner behind Be Your Own Pet, as the Nashville teens headlined the Middle East on Saturday night. Thirty years after punk rock was declared stone cold dead by the very artists who wrote the post - garage rock book and promptly tore it up, BYOP played like they invented it. Not reinvented, but actually just discovered musical and social anarchy. Such was the quartet's fervent, frenetic act.

But if punk was a rebel yell against what had gone before, BYOP's seriously short , 40-minute set, culled from its fun self-titled debut CD, honored traditions.

Led by bleached-blond Edie Sedgwick- like Jemina Pearl, and distinguished by guitarist Jonas Stein's occasional transcendental licks, the band's uber- focused delivery seemed to hone the songs into even shorter, sharper stabs than on record. Oddly, or not, BYOP ignored one of their best songs, a far more pop effort about zombies called ``Ouch," which is tucked at the back end of their CD. On that song Pearl sounds like a sassy, cute Gwen Stefani protegee, not the Courtney Love -like wildling she purported to be at the Middle East as she squealed manically and shook psychotically, all hardcore hysteria.

``We're here to get signed," yelled a member of Atlanta's the Black Lips to the audience, referring, possibly sarcastically, of NEMO's promise of ``one big [business] opportunity."

This cheeky, Bolshy young quartet from Atlanta, which played just before BYOP, exuded brittle honesty and had a raw revisionist sound that was '60s Brit beat pop/blues rock -- the Stones, the Beatles, and the Animals -- mixed with the raw rockabilly of the source, the South, with no sweeteners, softeners, or sophistication.

Standout cut ``Boomerang " was a blues-punk spiritual for malcontents. But all through the set the band grasped, stabbed, and pushed at each song's familiar practiced comforts, eager to question and smash them wide open and move on up.