Tobin Sprout

Moonflower Plastic (Welcome to My Wigwam) (Matador)
by Nik Rainey

As a composer, Tobin Sprout may not be the ten-songs-before-breakfast compulsive that his Guided by Voices ex-colleague Robert Pollard is, but his second solo effort finds him claiming some of the spotlight for himself without any apparent attention deficit or feeling quite the need to approximate tinnitus in the recording process. Sprout obviously relishes the freedom – his songs tend to have a leisurely, unforced mid-tempo gait to them, as if relieved to be able to make a point in greater than thirty seconds for a change.

Like his former band, Sprout is gingerly testing the waters of decent production – most of Moonflower Plastic was laid down in a succession of real studios, though it’s somehow difficult to distinguish them sonically from the songs retrieved from the 4- and 8- tracks of Tobin’s past. Regardless of setting, the tunes remain delightful, tasteful as you would expect from an over-thirty pop songwriter, sure, but capable of shooting flashback chills through your spine to his classic GBV contributions of old and diffidently dazzling with their light-fingered surrealism (“Angels Hang Their Socks on the Moon”) and imaginary echoes of what McCartney coulda become if he had the slightest bit of soul in him – maybe his Plastic Eastman Band album would’ve sounded a little bit like this. Regardless, this album may finally help Tobin Sprout duck those George Harrison comparisons he’s been tarred with these last few years. (Of course, by that analogy, he’s still only two-thirds of the way through All Things Must Pass, so maybe we should wait and see if he rips off an old girl-group on his next album or Eric Clapton starts taking an interest in his wife before we let him off that hook.)