Solo voices

GbV's Pollard and Sprout do their own things

by Amy Finch

On the Web, Net-savvy Guided by Voices fans have been fretting over the latest portents from that Dayton outfit. It seems that main GbV singer/songwriter Robert Pollard and guitarist bandmate (and sometime GbV songwriter) Tobin Sprout have issued their own solo albums. Sprout, it's said, is pulling away from GbV in order to pursue his own songwriting and tend to his growing family. The band's record label, Matador, avows that all the current members of the band are working together on the next GbV album. (A GbV EP is due in late November.) Wherever the chips may ultimately fall, we now have Pollard's Not in My Airforce, featuring a roster of musicians suspiciously similar to GbV: songwriting brother Jim, guitarist/songwriter Jim Shepherd (of Columbus's V3), bassist Matt Sweeney, drummer Kevin Fennell, guitarist Mitch Mitchell, and Sprout. All of whom make a sound suspiciously similar to GbV -- guitar pop suffused with harmony, steady traces of dissonance, and strings of words that radiate a splintered sort of intelligence on the order of a smart person having a nervous breakdown.

In the meantime, Sprout has released Carnival Boy. Besides being more of a true solo in that he plays everything except drums (Fennell again), Carnival Boy gives welcome consideration to the second-stringer's luxuriant pop principles. His songwriting neurons may not be as energetic as Pollard's (who is said by some to have written 5000 songs in the past decade), but his songs tend to be especially deliberate, as well as beautifully constructed.

In that respect, Carnival Boy also bears a strong family resemblance to GbV. Like Pollard, Sprout has a talent for putting together short songs with an unalloyed sweetness. Yet his music tends to come across as more tender, if only because his voice is so guileless and pretty; it synchronizes with the gentle pull of his music. He sings with delicate precision, his voice unfaltering and affecting. Once, when it's just him in a spare setting with an acoustic guitar ("Gas Daddy Gas"), he does come perilously near to sounding like an enervated relative of Paul Simon. But usually the Sprout voice is a success, whether it's surrounded by quiet strumming or full-bodied pop.

In addition to being a musician, Sprout is a superrealist artist; a print of at least one of his paintings is viewable on the Internet, and two of his compositions adorn Carnival Boy. The images he shapes in his music share a bit of that realism in that he isn't given to reveries quite as fractured as Pollard's. (Compare Carnival Boy with Pollard's collage CD covers.)

Considering Carnival Boy and Not in My Airforce together has the potential to be insulting to Sprout because you're tempted to view his music in the shadow of Pollard's. In fact, Carnival Boy is so pleasing and powerful that it more than holds its own. Sprout's lyrics aren't as surreal or colorful as Pollard's, but his (relative) lucidity and directness of emotion have a distinct value of their own. Carnival Boy's title track, for instance, is tactile in a way that makes the dreamer boy flat-out heartbreaking as he goes off "to find his life."

Sometimes, listening to a Sprout song, you get the impression he's made a conscious effort to tell the story of someone who just might exist. In this respect Carnival Boy is a warmer, more human collection than Not in My Airforce. Unlike Pollard, whose non-narratives are often oblique enough to feel like exercises in intellect, Sprout infuses his words with a layer of romance. It's impossible to imagine, for instance, Pollard crooning "The Natural Alarm," with its lines "To always love you/Till the end of heaven/Comes today."

Pollard once told an interviewer that he writes love songs to the world, he doesn't write about personal relationships. His "you" tends to show up in more cryptic forms, as in "I've Owned You for Centuries:" "When you were drowsier/You were not quick to scare/Back then I could take you/Back then I could move you around." Up close, the ideas behind his words seem inscrutable, but from a distance it's clear that Pollard uses the same palette as Sprout. They share an unerring sense of melody and diversity. And that's a relief, given that rumor says the next "full-length" GbV album will be a triple-disc, 100-track affair.