The first thing the listener will notice about Ricked Wicky is that it is the most musically adept project Guided By Voices’ frontman Robert Pollard has undertaken in some time, at least since late period-GBV (Half-Smiles of the Decomposed, for instance), or even Boston Spaceships. “[Ricked Wicky] is a sophisticated arena rock band,” says Pollard, and I Sell The Circus offers in evidence a series of ball-peen hammers to the brain-pan (“Piss Face” with its James Gang-era slide guitar and the proto-punk stomp of “Intellectual Types,” for example) alongside more delicate, prog-tinged frippery (“Cow-Headed Moon” features “Court of the Crimson King”-esque mellotron, while the acoustic guitar displayed on “Even Today and Tomorrow” recalls the mellow-era ELP of “Lucky Man”).

Credit the players: bolstering the easy mastery of a dizzying array of songwriting forms one naturally expects (and receives) from Pollard are the impressive instrumental prowess of fellow Daytonian Nick Mitchell (“no blood relation to Mitch,” Pollard stresses), who can otherwise be found in near-weekly performance at Wings, an important Dayton sports bar, multi-instrumentalist and producer Todd Tobias, and “the worldly Kevin March,” (Pollard again) who does double duty these days in Guided By Voices. These guys can play, and on I Sell The Circus, they play the fuck out of the songs.

“The band named Ricked Wicky is significant in that it is the very first name I created for a non-existent band in my early teens,” explains Pollard. Fourteen of its fifteen tracks were recorded at Cyberteknics in Dayton, a studio Pollard has come to use with increasing frequency due to its profusion of vintage analog gear.

“Some may wish to refer to us as a ‘super group,'” says Pollard, tongue practically poking through his cheek, but as with a lot of the pronouncements made by the oracle of Huffman Prairie, as no one has ever called him or ever will, he’s joking, but he’s not joking. Ricked Wicky may not be a super group as the term is too-commonly used, but there’s no real doubt they’re a super group.

‘Ricked Wicky: I Sell The Circus’ LP Tracklisting

01. Well Suited
02. Death Metal Kid
03. Guts
04. Cow Headed Moon
05. Piss Face
06. Even Today And Tomorrow
07. Intellectual Types
08. Uranus Flies
09. The Important Girl
10. Frenzy Of Blame
11. Mobility
12. Tomorrow
13. Miles Of Concentration
14. Rotten Backboards
15. A Real Stab