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Entertainment Weekly Reviews GBV LPs
Tobin Sprout Moonflower Plastic (Welcome To My Wigwam)
Song titles like "Angels Hang Their Socks on the Moon" notwithstanding,
Sprout's second solo effort showcases the Guided by Voices guitarist's
talents as a deft pop stylist imbued with a more traditional, less
surreal vision than that of GBV main man Bob Pollard. If the production
were a tad more highfalutin, songs like the lovely "Since I..." might
even have a shot at top 40 airplay. B+ (review by Tom Sinclair)
GUIDED BY VOICES Mag Earwhig!
For GbV's 10th album, lead singer Robert Pollard replaced his old
bandmates with fellow Ohioans Cobra Verde. the new players may be younger,
geekier, and less fun to watch on stage, but they can whip out a mean
anthemic-pop tune at least as well as the guys in GbV's previous
incarnation. GRADE: A. --Ethan Smith
June 3, 1994
Bee Thousand
Guided By Voices
It's not hard to understand the underground buzz about "Bee Thousand"
(Scat), the latest batch of basement tapes (and eighth overall album)
released by Guided By Voices. the band is a loose conglomeration of
bash-happy friends and relatives of Robert Pollard, a 36-year-old Dayton,
Ohio, elementary schoolteacher with a serious Beatles affliction.
Obnoxiously smart and obnoxiously sloppy, "Bee Thousand" contains the
same formal appreciation of pop tradition and the same seeming
irreverence toward the music business that have characterized previous
critical darlings from The Soft Boys and The Replacements. (Those
qualities also helped them snag a slot on the Second Stage of the
Lollapaloosa '94 tour.)
Most of these 20 "songs" are little more than fragments of single,
occasionally glorious Lennon/McCartney-style licks pegged to
ostentatiously gratuitous absurdities. The resulting profound lack of
meaning is as intensely as its sheer novelty is appealing. Whether he
wants to or not, Pollard and his loose-knit gang may be the logical
successors to Beck in the up-from-the-underground poster-boy category.
Grade: B+
Reviewer - Deborah Frost
Alien Lanes (Mach 17, 1995)
After nine albums accompanied by foaming-at-the-mouth critical adulation,
you'd think Guided By Voices would be ripe for commercial breakout. But
Robert Pollard's fragmented, hallucinatory compositions and rudimentary
production serve as kind of insurance against overexposure. This 28-cut
release, which holds its own against last year's "Bee Thousand," will
keep the secret safe, at least until they succumb to 24-track studio
polish. Stay tuned.
B+ (Mike Flaherty)
Under the Bushes Under the Stars (March 29, 1996)
Whereas these middle-aged Ohioans' best recorded work has consisted
largely of beautiful, lo-fi song scraps (some as short as 18 seconds)
that together formed a satisfying whole, "Bushes" is all fully realized
songs, many of which simply shouldn't be as long as they are. Still,
singer Robert Pollard writes the best melodies around, and his lyrics
are consistently breathtaking in their surrealistic beauty.
B+ (Ethan Smith)
Robert Pollard - Not In My Airforce/Tobin Sprout - Carnival Boy
(September 13, 1996)
These simultaneous releases by the principal members of Ohio's Guided By
Voices aren't a drastic departure from the bands output - not surprising,
since both feature contributions from various current and former GBV
members. Frontman Pollard's disc maintains his uncanny balance of homey
lo-fi ambience and epic hooksmanship, while guitarist Sprout's effort is
more carefully crafted and compositionally linear but no less infectious.
Both: A- (Scott Schinder)