BIG STIR RECORDS and ANTON BARBEAU are proud to announce the March 25 release of Anton's album POWER POP!!! The new collection features 19 tracks balanced between fully formed songs (including the lead single “Rain, Rain”) and a handful of fascinating interstitial miniatures. It's available for pre-order on CD and digital formats now at

BIG STIR RECORDS and ANTON BARBEAU are proud to announce the March 25 release of Anton's album POWER POP!!! The new collection features 19 tracks balanced between fully formed songs (including the lead single “Rain, Rain”) and a handful of fascinating interstitial miniatures. It's available for pre-order on CD and digital formats now at www.bigstirrecords.com and most online music outlets, and will be streaming and on record store shelves worldwide upon the release date. It follows on the success of a string of recent albums including 2020's ambitious Manbird and last year's Oh The Joys We Live For on Big Stir, both acclaimed as high points in Barbeau's prolific career. The release date of the album is shared with Omnivore Records' lovingly curated reissue of The Loud Family and Anton Barbeau's What If It Works? – Ant's 2006 collaboration with the much-missed indie rock genius Scott Miller – making the day a landmark in the legendary psychedelic troubadour's storied career.

It's to be said at the outset that the title of POWER POP!!! is archly ironic: Barbeau intends the album partly as a rebuke of the self-imposed limits of the titular genre. He's not sugarcoating it, either: “Put down your guns, you culture cops, there ain't no crime like power pop” is just one of the pointed barbs in the title track (which also happens to be as filled with hooks and grooves as anything Anton's ever done). The ongoing critique is amplified in “The Sound,” a driving psychedelic takedown of facile genre purism, and the garage/new wave ode to “Julian Cope,” a key Anton influence and fellow iconoclast equally known for blending melody and quirk into something utterly new.

But more than a sharp commentary laced with both kinds of acid, POWER POP!!! is very much about Anton reinventing the very wheel he's puncturing. “The concept is, early ABBA gets hipped to Krautrock, disavowing their Schlager roots. Drugs happen. Their tight, super-pop sound merged with the kosmische vibe catches the ear of young David Bowie who offers to produce their next record. They convince him to co-write and sing on the record, and the rest is alternate-history,” says Ant. “Can’t say I lived up to that, but out of noble ambitions grow tiny Raspberries, I suppose!”

As always, those ambitions and Barbeau's wandering muse lead him down other avenues as well, from the rollicking surrealist cowpunk of “Hillbilly Village” to the nearly-self-explanatory “The Drugs” and the song fragments scattered amongst the fleshed-out tunes, each with its own rewards. But the primary thread emerging from the tapestry of styles and sonic textures on display might be a sort of psychedelic synth-pop, with Anton making no secret of OMD and New Musik as primary inspirations. You can hear it on the dance-groove- propelled “Free,” the unabashed electropop of “The Never Crying Wolf Boy,” and “Running On The Edge Of The Knife,” which could be an extract from the soundtrack to an '80s action film until it takes a left turn (quite literally) into a rustic pigpen. It's a quintessentially Antonian juxtaposition and, like so much of the record, a giddy delight.

Those dominant synth soundscapes inspire some of Barbeau's most indelible melodies and vocal performances, from the fresh compositions like the harrowing “American Road” to the-album closing Teen Suite. There, Anton reimagines a trio of his early recordings to compelling effect: “Whisper In The Wind” is simply lovely, the new single “Rain, Rain” stands with the best of electronic pop music then or now, and the touchingly tender “Valerie's Waiting” hits a mark between chamber pop and new wave that's a world of its own.

More than a broadside, POWER POP!!! sees Anton Barbeau charting his own path forward as always, inviting the adventurous pop-rock fans of the world to follow. He's aided and abetted in his work by like-minded luminaries like Donald Ross Skinner (known as Cope's longtime collaborator Donn-Eye), guitarists Kevin Allison and Charlotte Tupman, saxophonist Fred Quentin, multi-instrumentalist Rosie Abbott, and vocalists Karla Kane (of The Corner Laughers), Lara Miyazaki, and Julia VBHB, Anton's wife who's also the graphic designer for the album. It's a work so unfettered by genre constraints that it can only be seen as Anton Barbeau's next leap, with much to offer to longtime fans and newcomers alike.

BIG STIR RECORDS is delighted to announce the July 16 CD and digital release of an all-new album from ANTON BARBEAU. OH THE JOYS WE LIVE FOR, heralded by its lead single “One Of Her Superpowers”, is up for preorder now at www.bigstirrecords.com/store and everywhere, and will be streaming across all platforms on its street date. The followup to

BIG STIR RECORDS is delighted to announce the July 16 CD and digital release of an all-new album from ANTON BARBEAU. OH THE JOYS WE LIVE FOR, heralded by its lead single “One Of Her Superpowers”, is up for preorder now at www.bigstirrecords.com/store and everywhere, and will be streaming across all platforms on its street date. The followup to Anton's acclaimed 2019 album Manbird, Oh The Joys is the answer to the question: what does a globetrotting psychedelic troubadour, having just released an ambitious concept album about being in constant motion, do when he's forced to stay in one place?

The answer here is that Barbeau lets his mind wander, while becoming deeply in tune with his sedentary surroundings, and produces one of the most inviting collections of his considerable career. Forced to decamp from Berlin, Germany, to a farm outside of Sacramento with collaborator and now-wife Julia Boorinakis Harper due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Anton brought with him the seeds for no fewer than four projects. Oh The Joys We Live For, the album that coalesced from the disparate concepts, is both intimate and expansive, reflective of its rustic origins but also full of the flights of surreal fancy and sweet melodic intrigue upon which Barbeau's reputation has been built.

Anton is musically aided and abetted by Harper and, remotely, an international cast of collaborators including UK songwriter/chanteuses Rosie Abbott and Sharron Kraus, the latter of whom adds appropriately bucolic recorder to several tracks. Kevin Allison of Anton's US backing band KENNY and Elephant 6 mainstay Bryan Poole contribute guitar, and there's a saxophone contribution from Fred Quentin of the French collective SALT (with whom Barbeau frequently sings). Mostly, though, the record is Ant working on his own on the farm, armed with what was at hand: an acoustic guitar and an electric 12-string, a Hofner bass, Logic Pro, and some choice bits and bobs previously tracked in Berlin.

The songs on Oh The Joys have similarly of-the-moment origins. It's a collection, Anton says, of whatever he happened to have in his pockets at the moment, but from the title track, a psych-folk litany of simple pleasures such as only Barbeau could recite, to the soaring, jangling closer “I Been Thinking 'Bout You”, everything fits. That tune, like the single “One Of Her Superpowers” was written for a shelved project Ant calls I Can't Believe It's Not Power Pop! and both show the man as an innate master of the form who's simply too sly for its lyrical limitations. The equally catchy “Cowbell Camembert” is a fragment of a proposed synth-folk song cycle called Christian Wife, centered on a square couple with secret kinks. “Die Smiling” and the infectious “Salt Lick” (with its refrain “Daddy kisses Mommy 'cuz Mommy's made of minerals”) were tracks written with a new Salt record in mind, and the hauntingly hilarious, piano-and-synth driven “Three Days The Death Enigma” was commenced in Berlin before Anton's extended return to the states.

There are flashes of rubbery countrified dub (“I Love It When She Does The Dishes”) and arty European synth pop (“Crystals”), fragments of orchestral experimentation (“Filmik”) and surreally boozy 6/8 sway (“When Life Brings You Beer”). But the definitive vibe might be set by the unlikeliest of Anton's abandoned projects, The Falco Years. “It was to be my lockdown party album,” he says, “but who wants to relive a pandemic, and really, who wants to party with Anton?” Listeners just might, though. What emerges isn't exactly a party, but it does often transform the listener into a fly on the wall of Anton and Julia's domestic existence in isolation in the quirkily sweetest of ways: by the time it's over you'll know which art films they watched night by night, the shape of their daily routine, and, on the appropriately tense “It's Alright Rosie”, the steps they took to acclimate their pets to lockdown life.

“You crossed a vast frontier, you are here,” Anton sings on “When Life Brings You Beer,” reeling off a list of the realities of daily farm life and a reminder of the vital importance of simply being present. It's not a lockdown party, but it is fun, a portrait of an agile mind making the very best of the limits of life in 2020, and spinning them into musical gold through the act of stubborn creativity. The surreal adornments hang fetchingly on a record that may be one of the most “real” depictions of life during quarantine you're likely to hear. Oh The Joys We Live For puts to bed the notion that a “quarantine album” need be a dreary, po-faced affair and lives up to its title as a document of oddball but genuine hope in salvation via contemplating – yes – whatever may be in your pockets at the moment. And it's another shining jewel in Anton Barbeau's already sterling catalog awaiting your contemplation as well.

No one label could ever hope to claim the musical force of nature that is ANTON BARBEAU. For that reason among many others, BIG STIR RECORDS is simply and humbly grateful to bring you ANTON BARBEAU PRÉSENTE: KENNY VS. THRUST, available on CD and download at www.BigStirRecords.com/store now.

Anton Barbeau is said to play "pre-apocalyptic

No one label could ever hope to claim the musical force of nature that is ANTON BARBEAU. For that reason among many others, BIG STIR RECORDS is simply and humbly grateful to bring you ANTON BARBEAU PRÉSENTE: KENNY VS. THRUST, available on CD and download at www.BigStirRecords.com/store now.

Anton Barbeau is said to play "pre-apocalyptic psychedelic pop", but that tag doesn't even begin to touch on the scope of his work. His oeuvre ranges from surreal acoustic balladry to experimental electronica to the mutant neo-cabaret of his most recent album Berliner Grotesk. On KvT, though, Anton rocks. The record takes its name from Ant's current backing bands in the US and UK – Sacramento-based KENNY and Oxford, England's THRUST, known in their own right as CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE – and is possessed of a loose and live energy that sets it apart from the man's 2019 releases, including Berliner Grotesk, the critically-adored Natural Causes, and Ant's work fronting the French-American supergroup SALT.

The songs are drawn from Barbeau's songbook spanning from his teen years to the present day, but the all-new performances are fresh and immediate, and the bi-continental production is a cohesive and bracing dive into the essence of Antmusik across time. And just who is Anton? He's a Taurus, born in Sacramento and now living by a canal in Berlin. He's made something like 30 albums and has worked with members of XTC, The Soft Boys, The Bevis Frond, Cake, and The Corner Laughers (his label-mates first on Mystery Lawn and now on BSR). He draws frequent comparisons to the likes of Syd Barrett, Julian Cope, and Robyn Hitchcock (whose erstwhile Egyptians bandmates Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe constituted the other two thirds of Ant's band Three Minute Tease). He split the singing and songwriter duties with the legendary Scott Miller on The Loud Family's What If It Works? LP. Anton breathes rarefied air indeed.

As with many of those influences and peers, there's a special magic when a musical polymath like Anton steps in front of a sympatico live band and lets the chemistry take over. On Kenny Vs. Thrust, Barbeau has two such bands: the titular Kenny (Kevin Allison: guitar, Tom Monson: drums, and Jeff Simons: bass) and Thrust (Matt Sewell: guitar, Jules Moss: bass, and Richard Nash: drums). Anton adroitly mixes and matches his tunes to each combo's considerable strength.: Thus it's Thrust powering through the two-guitar sludge attack of the opener “Wire From The Wall” (sounding not unlike, well, Wire), the rhythmically trippy pysch of “Popsong 99” and the delightfully titled “Beautiful Bacon Dream”, and the Hitchcock-indebted and -referencing “Haunted in Fenland”. “Mahjong Dijon” with its acoustic-and-electric-12-string swagger rounds out the contributions from the moonlighting Charms Against The Evil Eye lads (from whom we hope to hear more under their own name this year).

Across the pond in California, it's Kenny backing Ant on the bracing meta-catchy “Land of Economy” (replete with serpentine fuzz-guitar lines from Barbeau himself), the stately “Burning Burning”, and the country-tinged “Clean Clothes In A Dirty Bag” (on which Corner Laugher Karla Kane gets “the last word”) – all of which Anton classes as his most political of tunes and are adorned with the requisite intensity any good protest deserves. Amazingly, they also sound imminently at home on the sweetly synth-laden “Back To Balmain” and the dub workout “Tidy Up Yourself”. And there's room along the way for the Ant-only “Jingle Jangle”, which serves as both a takedown and prime example of the genre its title would lead one to expect.

“There’s something beautifully balanced between the style and sound of each band. Of course, there’s me gluing it all together with too many synths,” says Anton. And it hangs together wonderfully, united by the singular lyrical whimsy for which Barbeau is known. Ever chasing one quixotic muse or another, Anton's busily preparing his next record, a concept piece known as Manbird that promises another journey across his own musical astral plane. Meanwhile, Kenny Vs. Thrust is destined to be the most car-stereo-crankable disc of Anton's – or perhaps anyone's – year, and we are thrilled to bring it to you.