Album Review: Creeping Punk – Mirror Woods

Mirror Woods is the first full-length effort from Creeping Pink, the newest band on the Castle Face Records roster.  Neither the slow verb in the band’s name nor the album’s languorous pace reflect the speed with which this music will lodge itself in your brain.

Creeping Pink consists of Indianapolis-native Landon Caldwell. Caldwell has described his album’s style as “tape glam,” a categorization that warrants investigation, since while “tape” clearly points to the lo-fi hissing and warbling noises that pervade Mirror Woods, the album contains almost nothing in the way of the fat uptempo rock song we tend to associate with “glam” (e.g. T-Rex, Bowie, Iggy and the Stooges). The songs here mostly swim in a slow-mo ether.    

But we can find the bridge between Caldwell’s dual descriptors in Brian Eno.  Caldwell’s bright crisp British-inflected vocals, on “Sour Fruit,” “Peaches,” and “Bacavan Blues,” bring to mind Eno’s singing, on tracks like “Spider and I” or “I’ll Come Running.” After making his name as a synthesist for Roxy Music (perhaps the quintessential glam band), and before his full-blown forays into tape loop based ambient experimentation, it was Eno who allowed atmospherics so prominent a place on pop records. For instance, on his 1975 album Another Green World, short sound pieces outnumber the pop songs. 

Similarly, Mirror Woods consists of 14 songs, 9 of which are under 3 minutes long, 3 of which are wordless, most of which forego a traditional verse-chorus-verse pop structure, and all of which feature densely layered textures and atmosphere that one can only describe as aggressive. The atmosphere throughout Mirror Woods is always threatening to subsume its songs’ infectious melodies. Both “Come Into My World” and “Sour Fruit” dissolve into dissonance, the former pausing before sustained chords on a detuned synth drag it into a nauseated bliss, the latter cutting in and out until the distortion of a transistor radio’s changing channel blots it out entirely and replaces it with the squeaking of a military bugle.

And yet, as Castle Face Records head John Dwyer notes in his emphatic blurb on the record label’s website, Mirror Woods is first and foremost a pop record.  Or, maybe more accurately, it’s an album oozing with sun-dappled nostalgia for a pop purity that can no longer be attained. It’s post-pop, then, but devoid of Ariel Pink’s arch, if loving, parodic irony. Pop, like the lost innocence referred to in “Mirror Wood’s Constant Dream of Childhood,” wherein a memory of a world “made of toys for all the little boys” is drowned in glitches and feedback and fuzz.  It can only be accessed through filters, indirectly. 

Dwyer touches on the filtered, or “cross-processed,” beauty of Mirror Woods, comparing it to a “Polaroid of a cathedral’s most glorious stained glass.” Which comes close. The Polaroid is taken with a finicky machine whose smudged lens catches severe flare from the sun’s slant, and before fully drying the picture changes hands several times, getting fingered and smeared before curling in the heat under the rear windshield of a car parked out of shade. The image of the ornate stained glass, bleached and warped and barely perceptible in the photo now, has become something else, something abstract, something compromised. But something beautiful, nonetheless.

This article was originally published in Little Village issue 182