Creeper Lagoon

SpinArt

Does anyone remember a time when Creeper Lagoon was supposed to save rock ’n’ roll? When my friend Allen and I ditched work to buy I Become Small and Go in the spring of ’98, the buzz was so erect we thought we were buying porch songs for the new millennium. All we got was a better-than-average indie-rock album, but it was enough to make me wish the San Francisco-based band hadn’t taken more than two years to release their new EP, the six-song Watering Ghost Garden. The soundscapes on Creeper Lagoon’s latest are a bit more delicate and stripped than on the Dust Brothers-produced I Become Small and Go, substituting that album’s occasional electronic throbs and squiggles for the chilling acoustic sleepwalk of “God Will Understand” and the full-on electric guitar freakout that closes “My Friends Will Adore You.”