Ricked Wicky: Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Robert Pollard doesn’t care about his legacy. Or, rather, he doesn’t care about how we see his legacy. Any attempt to wrangle Pollard as head of Guided By Voices, or as a solo artist, or as the frontman for various and sundry pop tangents, is laid flat beneath the weight of the next release and the next release and the next release. Pollard’s new, post-classic-line-up-GBV band is Ricked Wicky, and he’s already cranked out three albums from this outfit in 2015. Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair is the latest of those albums, and it confirms for us a couple of things. For one, Ricked Wicky sounds like a shot in the arm for Pollard, a productive new outlet for his ever-working pop muse. But it’s also clear that, even after three albums, we still can’t pin Ricked Wicky down yet.

The band features Pollard mainstays Kevin March on Drums and Todd Tobias on bass, as well as guitarist/singer/songwriter Nick Mitchell. Together, they started with I Sell the Circus, a kind of oddball, occasionally proggy rock record, one that twists the pop dynamics of Guided By Voices into something more muscled and edged, but not quite as strange as some of Pollard’s other side projects. The hints at oddity on that record, though, came through fully realized on its follow up, King Heavy Metal, a record that stands out in Pollard’s recent discography as a nice balance between consistent songwriting and the kind of strange left turns that feel more satisfying and playful than frustrating.

For the most part, though, Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair doesn’t continue this trajectory. It still has the fresh blast of energy its two predecessors, but it comes across as far more straightforward than either of those records. The twangy acoustic opening of “What Are All Those Paint Men Digging?” leads into some chugging, chunked-up riffs, but the shift feels relatively seamless, especially as the acoustic runs meld with March’s drums in the middle of the song. It’s an opener willing to shift tempos enough to keep us wondering where the record will go. But “Crystal Titanic” is all pure, power pop catchiness. Pollard’s vocals blast out of the speakers, the drums crash and the hooks swirl around, and even if it bottoms out for a minute into a spacious breakdown, it comes back full-force for a triumphant close.

Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair may recall, most directly, Pollard’s work in Boston Spaceships. That project, with Chris Slusarenko and John Moen, showed just how potent Pollard can be when he’s a free-swinging front man or a pure rock and roll band. The same is true here. So even when he dips into sweeter pop turns, like the swaying melodies of “Poor Substitute”, the band girds the song with crunching, distorted layers. The album doesn’t totally leave the tangents behind. “No Man Would Develop” has the kind of stop-start structure Pollard has been weaving into records for decades now, and it feels like an outlier on a record full of shifting but satisfying rockers. Because once it makes way for Nick Mitchell’s “Plastic Ocean Getaway” or once we get to Pollard’s sweeping, arena ballad “Could I See the List One More Time?”, it’s clear that Ricked Wicky is at its best when all the players are in lockstep with one another, rather than being divided into parts of a strange whole.

Kevin March’s drumming provides a lot of the power here, but Nick Mitchell’s presents is the most surprising and refreshing on the record. Marshall’s songs offer a nice foil for Pollard’s. If Pollard filters classic rock through his skewed sensibility, Marshall goes for straight-on tribute. “Plastic Ocean Giveaway” is a perfectly genuine rock and roll vacation, complete with lean riffs and a towering chorus. “Blind Slide” adds a blistering guitar solo to the mix and the results are just as plainly excellent. Marshall’s songs aren’t simpler than Pollard’s necessarily — they’ve surely got their own complexities — but they feel in line with traditions Pollard prefers to distort. Working together, Pollard, Marshall, and the rest of Ricked Wicky give a multi-angle view of rock and roll. On Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair, the band may not get as weird as King Heavy Metal, but it also proves it doesn’t need to. This may be the most straightforward set from Pollard’s new outfit, but it’s no less satisfying than the previous two and, taken as a whole of the band’s progress in 2015, all three records suggest a band that can’t sit still but has an idea where it’s going.