| Home | Fading Captain Series | GBV News | The Band | The Music | The Critics & Fans | Merchandise | Other Stuff |

Let's Welcome The Circus People
Tobin Sprout
recordhead

In his book Rock and Pop Narcotic, self styled Regius professor of rock Joe Carducci attempts to divide all music into good and bad. It's a Sisyphusian act of obsessive clarification worthy of the botanist Linnaeus, but when it comes to defining the X factor that makes merely good music great, even the rationalist Carducci must grope towards the spiritual. Whatever the extra element is, Robert Pollard, frontman of Ohio's Guided By Voices, has it by the bucketful. That said, he might also be benefiting from the scientific truth that if you throw enough garage-rock guitar riffs at your home studio wall some of them are going to stick, having released more than 300 songs since 1986. Pollard's latest opus is the usual mixture of Duracel-powered 1960s beat-pop, folkish acoustic ballads, Scrabble-board lyrics and prog-rock weirdness - and it's brilliant. If Pollard is GBV's Lennon and McCartney rolled into one, then Tobin Sprout was their George Harrison. His third solo album is pleasant enough psychedelic indie-pop fare, even if Vertical Insects sounds like a Traveling Wilbury's out-take.

SL