Album Review: Mirror Starts Moving Without Me by Pom Pom Squad

"Saw my own reflection on the TV / Staring down on me from outside my body," Berrin admits on the album's thesis track and FOMO dissertation, "Everybody's Moving On. " She continues the haunting thought by confessing, "Everything I wanted for / I don't want it anymore / As I'm watching myself watching myself watch me. " If it's the child, and not the house, that's haunted in James Wan's Insidious franchise, then it's the pop star who's haunting herself on Mirror Starts Moving Without Me.

Full Review >>

The sophomore effort from Mia Berrin and her bandmates - drummer Shelby Keller, bassist Lauren Marquez, guitarist Alex Mercuri and new addition, Berrin's co-producer and co-writer Cody Fitzgerald of Stolen Jars - delivers a potent blend of grunge-inflected rock and pop sensibilities. Using the metaphor of a hall of mirrors and the idea of Alice in Wonderland as a major touchstone, the tumbled, harangued, and dependent on others waif to whom things happen rather than seeming choices she's 'given'. "Downhill" has Berrin falling down her own personal rabbit hole, partially created by the acclaim of her 2021 debut Death of a Cheerleader, and the unexpected changes it created.

Full Review >>

It's a shame that internet discourse, in the way it seems to always do, pitted Pom Pom Squad's Mia Berrin against Olivia Rodrigo back in 2021 because both made use of similar visual tropes. As, notwithstanding the notion of setting two women of colour against each other being an issue in itself, there is ultimately much on 'Mirror Starts Moving Without Me' that the masses won over by 'GUTS' would very much enjoy. Pom Pom Squad's second full-length presents a protagonist uncomfortable in their own skin, using at first a synthetic pop palette and later (and far more successfully), a more familiar grungy guitar sound.

Full Review >>