A piano’s keys issue a painful melody that Mike Rickard picks up and turns into a pointed harmony with little more than his soft, entrancing voice as we listen in on the opening bars of “Surrender,” the closing track of his album Out Loud, but despite the heady dose of emotionality that we receive in this song’s first thirty seconds feeling impossible to match, let alone top, it’s undeniably on par with what we encounter in “Not Finished Yet,” its predecessor in this tracklist, nevertheless.
Mike Rickard lyrically pulls out the big guns for the moving power ballad “Six Queer Kids,” digs into one of his most sensational grooves to date in “Sand” and plays off of a familiar beat’s easygoing rhythm in “Alright,” and while his ambitions are stacked as high as One World Trade Center, there’s scarcely a moment in Out Loud where he doesn’t sound as swaggering as he ever has before – if not just a touch more than his fans are used to. The bottom line here? This is pop for a generation demanding nothing but the best out of their indie players, and I believe it to be a must-listen for anyone who loves the genre at its most vulnerable.
“Taste Your Smile” starts off with a lurid little guitar part that could melt even the coldest of hearts this spring, but in terms of instrumental chills n’ thrills that last from the beginning of a track to the very instant it disappears into the silence from which it was first sprung, “Wouldn’t Be Love” is probably the most aggressively sexy song to behold here.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Loud-Mike-Rickard/dp/B07FZGLVWH
Along with “You’re to Blame,” “Wouldn’t Be Love” feels remarkably groove-oriented, yet it doesn’t shortchange us on smart lyrical content for a second. Mike Rickard has never been one to fill his records with a lot of experimental bells and whistles, and in this way, he hasn’t changed a bit in Out Loud; from the minimalist melodies of the title cut to the stoic crossing of the finish line that we hear in “Surrender,” he’s on the top of his game, omitting no substance from his songcraft while leaving all the extra fat on the sidelines.
While some of the material on Out Loud is deceptively simple from a compositional perspective (the magnetizing “What Love Looks Like” is a prime example), I don’t think there’s a track on this record that doesn’t have a certain level of emotional sting to it, from more on the nose numbers like “Don’t Feed the Ghosts” and “Six Queer Kids” to enigmatic tunes like “Sand,” “You’re to Blame” and “Wouldn’t Be Love.” If you were to ask me what I take away from this release more than anything else, it would be that Mike Rickard is intent on making the most of every talent he’s been blessed with as a musician, and judging from the highbrow nature of the way he stylized Out Loud, I would count on seeing his name in the headlines a lot more often as his story continues to unfold before us.
Jodi Marxbury