ANTON BARBEAU
Anton Barbeau plays ‘pre-apocalyptic psychedelic pop’. He’s a Taurus, born in Sacramento and now living by a canal in Berlin. He’s made something like 30 albums, the songs on which mostly sit in the Transistor Music catalogue, and has worked with members of XTC, The Soft Boys, the Bevis Frond, Cake, the Loud Family and the Corner Laughers. Julian Cope got him stoned in Croydon once.
Anton Barbeau represents the Sacramento chapter of that nameless coterie of enduringly reliable, acid-tinged singer-songwriters that includes XTC’s Andy Partridge, Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope and the Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman. The Sunday Times wrote “the album bathes beautifully constructed, thoughtfully arranged songs in a fading psychedelic sunshine, and it would be many casual consumers’ album of the year if only they got to hear it. Four stars.”
Prolific, pretentious, precocious, intelligent, quirky, nasal, amusing, annoying to some, pop genius to others, and never ever boring—this is the cumulative description of northern California’s musical auteur Anton Barbeau. His songs are fervid, swarming, tangential and often humorous, but possessed of a compelling inner logic.
Albums written and produced by Anton also in catalogue include those with Three Minute Tease and Allyson Seconds.
“Despite the easy tag, Barbeau peddles neither pop nor psychedelia, it’s power that’s the important word. Though they’re completely unrelated references, think of Julian Cope’s sprawling Krautrock and Zappa’s ironic everything as touchstones for how outsider music can get inside you and change the way you think, feel and hear. Barbeau deserves a place alongside them.” –Logo, UK