The Blind Pets

The Blind Pets

The Blind Pets' excellent Smashed (2009) played out like a toddler tantrum in a grocery store: kicking, thrashing, and demanding attention for the better part of an hour. With Sweet Tooth, the local power trio refines those impulses into one of the better Saturday night rock LPs in recent memory. There's a SoCal strut to TBP's stoner metal, equal parts Queens of the Stone Age's cocksure sleaze (the opening title track), the heavy vision questing of Sleep ("Mountain"), and Fu Manchu's early asphalt huffing ("The Who"). Guitarist/vocalist Josh Logan squirms like Mudhoney's Mark Arm, a parallel made apparent with lines like "Come get sick with me" on taunting flare-up "Marshall Law." Despite the apparent influences and without a runt in the litter, Sweet Tooth proves the Blind Pets are coming into their own – hungry, brutishly defiant, and willing to fight their way out of any corner.