For the past few weeks I've been waffling as to how I was going to cover the Nylon Tour show at the Showbox. I had already written favorable, full-length, live show reviews of Switches and She Wants Revenge and it has hardly been a secret that ever since I first heard Be Your Own Pet's new album Get Awkward, I've gladly drank every glass of Kool-Aid they put in front of me.

There was a fourth band on the bill, The Virgins, were a perfectly acceptable pop-rock band with some fairly catchy songs, but I hadn't bothered to even visit their MySpace page before the show and nothing convinced me during their set that I was missing something.

I eventually decided that I was going to enjoy the show in civilian's clothes. I still have a large queue of stuff I need to finish writing anyway and hardly should be adding to it.

The band I was there to see, of course, was BYOP. I didn't know what to expect from their show. Get Awkward has been on very high rotation on my iPod for the past two months and P4k wrote of the other bands on this tour, "[t]hose dudes are going to get blown off the stage by a bunch of damn kids. Every night." My expectations were high, of course, but I'm going to the show as a fan, not a reviewer, remember?

BYOP was to go on at 9:30 last night and they started about 5 minutes early and played for 28 minutes. Live, they sound nothing like they do on record. The guitar parts are still loud and punk but on stage they were even faster. Singer Jemina Pearl kept up, barely pausing for a breath, not just between songs but between verses as well. My two favorite songs, "The Kelly Affair" and "Becky" were played back-to-back and the 5 1/2 minutes those two songs' running time combines to was compacted into about 3 minutes. The set was nihilistic and messy. The pop-punk on the record I love had the pop deleted from it; I don't think I heard anything resembling a hook for their entire set.

I loved every single moment of the 28 minutes BYOP was on stage. Just before finishing up their set (with "Super Soaked"), Pearl mocked the nervous record store execs who pulled 3 songs from Get Damaged and well-intentioned (but clueless) PTA members by asking rhetorically if it would be great to just be able to kill anyone you wanted. She was just as sincere as when she said the Showbox was "the greatest club in the universe" earlier.

After that, I knew my ass was kicked and went home and straight to bed.