It's strange to hear vulnerability in Scott McCloud's voice.

As the singer-guitarist in 1990s post-punk-riff rockers Girls Against Boys, McCloud had a sassy, defiant, Mark E. Smith-like chant when he delivered his strange poetry and punning wordplay on such indie-rock hits as "Disco Six Six Six" and "Kill the Sexplayer."

But with that band pretty much on ice, and his side project, New Wet Kojak, down for the count, McCloud has turned to the acoustic guitar and strikingly confessional songs for the debut album, "Failure American Style," by his new vehicle, Paramount Styles.

"It was a convergence of different personal life stuff," McCloud said in explaining this new direction. "I was in between places: I had been living in Paris for a while, I was coming back to New York. I was going through a divorce; I didn't really have a place to stay. I was sofa surfing again, at my age, and I was thinking, 'What am I doing?'

"I thought the only way I could really grow was to limit myself to acoustic guitar," he continued. "My original idea was to write songs with a lot of chord progressions, instead of the riff-oriented stuff I'm used to. Challenge myself a big and write these sweeping chord progressions, like a Tom Petty song, but then do my thing on it and see if they turn out."

McCloud's "thing" is a whisper-talk way of singing that recalls Lou Reed at his least strident. It's reminiscent of the voice McCloud used in the early days of Girls Against Boys (GVSB), but now he doesn't have the luxury of a stuttering rhythm pattern and two bass guitars to hide behind. On 1998's "Freak*on*ica," GVSB's long major-label record, McCloud actually attempted to sing in a traditional manner, and he was never comfortable with it.

"Without any proper training, I tried to assimilate myself or just fit in with the more ephemeral radio market a?? I didn't know what it really was," he said. "For this, I wanted to go to a period of comfortably with the way I sang before. I wanted it to be more of the [1993 album] 'Venus Luxure' style a?? it's lower-key stuff, it's not as abrasive. But that kind of thing. I wanted to not strive so hard to do something that I didn't even know how to do. I just wanted to be myself."

McCloud has been struggling to figure out who he is a?? personally and musically a?? for much of the time since GVSB released its last CD, "You Can't Fight What You Can't See," in 2002.

"In 2002, I didn't know ... if I wanted to make music at that point, or whether I even had in the first place," McCloud laughed. "But I started thinking about it again, and a friend said come into the studio and record."

What "Failure American Style" amounts to is an 11-song collection filled with regret, humor and anger. Tracks such as "Paradise Happens," "Hollywood Tales 2," "These Starry Nights," "Drunx, Whores & Mzk People," "Come to New York" and "The Crazy Years" and it grew out of McCloud's experiences of being in a band that almost made it big and the subsequent wilderness years he experienced personally when it didn't.

"This record isn't so much about making it as a rock star; it's about looking back on all those experiences," McCloud said. "I think after Girl Against Boys, which is where I basically ended, for the next couple of years, and even increasingly so, I'd think back and say, 'What was that ride really all about? What was I looking for?' Maybe, in general, what are people looking for when they do these creative, extreme things? You have a dream to do something and maybe you don't even know why.

"The word 'paramount' makes me think of something cinematic, or old Hollywood movies," McCloud continued, explaining the band's name. "And I thought writing songs about reflecting back on this life in music, and the way I lived it, I kind of felt like I was trying to live some movie of my life. There's a whole lot of fantasy with the pursuit of rock music, especially when you're immersed in it. So, it had a melancholy sound to me, Paramount Styles a?? or almost nostalgic."

McCloud has a lot to look back on. He has been recording since the mid-1980s when he was a teenage guitarist in Lunchmeat, which turned into Soulside, which helped define the post-Revolution Summer sound of Dischord Records and whose rhythm section a?? bassist Johnny Temple (who now runs Akashic Books) and drummer Alexis Fleisig (now in Paramount Styles) a?? went on to form Girl Against Boys with McCloud and Eli Janney. (McCloud also played with Janney in Rain.)

Growing up in the Dischord-dominated D.C. punk scene has stayed with McCloud, even if during GVSB's flirtation with major label success seemed like the antitheses of the label's DIY ethos.

"Coming up and getting involved in music in the D.C. scene a?? for music in the '90s, it was a hotspot for the debate that went on in that time: the indie / major thing, the whole indie of what independent rock was supposed to be about," McCloud said. "Even in Girls Against Boys I tried to explore that contradiction, and in this I'm still trying to do the same thing, just later in life. Failure American Style' is looking back and saying, at 40, how do you view all that stuff that was so much a part of your identity for all those years? Was it a success? Was it a failure? ... For years, I thought of myself as a failure. So, in part, it's trying to reconcile some of these things and trying to get in touch with some fundamental thing about why I do this, that can still be honest but be different from what I did before. Can I leave behind this persona or idea of what I'm supposed to be and just move on to something that's more relevant to who I am now?"

Sounds like the "Sexplayer" is effectively dead.

--Express (Oct. 2008)