Come Home To Me by Anton Barbeau: Album Review
Come Home To Me by Anton Barbeau: Album Review
Do you know how bismuth crystals are formed? When molten bismuth cools and solidifies, it grows into an iridescent, stair-stepped “hopper” shape due to rapid crystal edge growth. If you listen to Anton Barbeau’s new album Come Home to Me, you might agree that a lot of the songs share the same properties as bismuth crystals. They are maze-like, interlaced, and edgy. They jut out at different angles, and they are all quite iridescent! Want to know more? Read on and I’ll buy you a chicken!
If you are unfamiliar with the fellow, Anton Barbeau is an Ian Hunter/Michel Polnareff ringer with salty sun-bleached surfer hair. Vocally, you might hear the timbre of Robyn Hitchcock or Peter Murphy. The mind behind the eyes behind the dark glasses has recently devised a 14-track (plus unlisted tracks) album due out this October.
Barbeau is a man of many albums- about a tessaracontad (that’s 40!) Over his extensive career, he has and continues to collaborate with forerunners of 70s, 80s, and 90s psychedelia. Come Home to Me has appearances by Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory ( XTC), Andy Metcalfe (Soft Boys and Squeeze), Donald Ross Skinner (Julian Cope), and Terry Edwards (Spiritualized, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave). Also featured on the album are Allyson Seconds, Rosie Abbott, along with Christy Claes, his wife, Julia Barbeau, on backing vocals.
The opener is “The World Calls Love”. Here, Barbeau sits you down in front of him and sings earnestly to you with his guitar. If you break eye contact with him, you’ll notice that the living room wall behind him opens up, revealing a blue sky and a high-definition green meadow. This is your foray into the realm of even more shining, iridescent songs.
His sonic choices are skillful throughout. You might catch a main vocal melody layered with another, but an octave higher or lower- a device espoused by Bowie. Vocals multiply in some of the songs and sound as if they’re sung from tilted balconies attached to the edges of a giant crystal. Listen for this in the end of “Your Holy Motor.” Guitar playing is adroit and varied in many of the tracks. It might have a traditional tickling Nashville feel, as in the song “Somebody to Blame”. Or there is a Ronsonesque solo that sets like an oily sunset in the middle of “Your Holy Motor”. Listen for a guitar that sounds like it’s being sliced in half violently by a giant table saw in “Swindon Calling”, one of the album’s standouts!
“Swindon Calling” has a verse with a melody that casts a net into a sea of incertitude. Here, Barbeau is looking for answers. A prechorus follows with an ebbing of the tide around the ankles. More questions gather in the small tidal whirlpools, but there’s a different chord progression (hints of Magazine’s “The Light Pours out of Me”). A mellotron rides atop the spume and the slosh in the waters of a potentially aggressive tide.
At the chorus, the waves gush in at full force with a guitar that sounds like it is being violently cut in half- there’s that tablesaw, and it’s in the middle of the ocean!
But a female voice chimes in: “Who’s the happy fellow buzzing around the garden?”
Is it Julia Barbeau reminding her husband of how he IS capable of being happy? This offers some resolution, and a feeling that the ocean will become calm again, a nice counter to that feeling of incertitude in the verses.
You can get lost in lots of curious detours and you can turn the sea back to slime in the title track “Come Home to Me”! The atmosphere is informed by the “black light in the basement.” But outside, there’s an orange post-apocalyptic twilight with small arpeggiated meteors that fall to earth. And of course you’ve got your Beatles’ “Yeah Yeah Yeahs”, but in the context of the song, they’re tinged with uncertainty, not unlike the verses in “Swindon Calling”. WILL the subject of the song come home? Barbeau pleads that if he or she or it does, he’ll offer up a chicken!
Alexandra Moulding
And who doesn’t love songs about flies?! Fans of psychedelia, punk and post-punk sure do! (Small Faces’ “Hungry Intruder”, Wire’s “I Am the Fly,” “Human Fly” by The Cramps?) “I Touched The Butter” is a curious number. Ok, fly in the butter. Vincent Price. Get the butter! There is a lot that happens in this song! A barrage of sound clips that remind you of those hygiene films from the late fifties, the word “guilty” repeated throughout, a sudden Wurli-driven groove, but then the whole song snaps abruptly back into its former self, complete with many terraced choruses in the coda that lead us out of the song! This song sends us on quite a journey as we crawl all over a multi-fasceted stick of butter!
Bismuth crystals are rarely found in nature and are often grown in laboratories. But listen to Anton Barbeau’s Come Home to Me if you want to EXPERIENCE the very properties of these crystals! Get lost in infinite iridescent angles. Descend those metallic steps and terraced formations. Take in those opalescent backing vocals and Mellotrons. Touch the sharp texture of those slicing guitars. Get lost in infinite arpeggiated synths.
Come Home To Me is very much an aural rhombohedral lattice, and it fully forms on October 9th.
Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out the other end, dusted off and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer back in Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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