Reviews: Come Home To Me
A PESSIMIST IS NEVER DISAPPOINTED
by Glenn
California's Anton Barbeau continues to make smart pop. I'd label some of his best tunes power pop, though it's not like he's making stuff like The Knack or anything. I'd use that term because it would get this music in front of the folks most likely to love it. Come Home to Me, Barbeau's new record, has broad appeal, with tunes clearly influenced by artists that were such a big influence on folks like me.
It's worth mentioning that Dave Gregory and Colin Moulding from XTC are on this one, as is Andy Metcalfe (The Soft Boys, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians). And while little here on Come Home to Me sounds like any of those bands, Anton's a talented writer and performer with clear appeal for anyone who likes those acts. "You Got Something" is bright and catchy, while "World Calls Love" is a really great piece of music. It puts me in mind of that Beatles-inspired record Phil Keaggy did on A&M in 1989 or so, and for the handful of other people who also cherish that one, you'll know exactly what I mean when you play some of these new Anton Barbeau songs.
At times, Anton Barbeau pushes things here in interesting directions, like on "The City Below," a more down-tempo number with Fripp-y guitars. It's evidence of Anton's more art-rock leanings from his past, as is "Awkward and Upward" later on the record. "Some Kinda Comfort" is a real gem that, oddly, made me think of Peter Murphy's solo singles a little bit. Still, Come Home to Me works best as a kind of homage to late Eighties/early Nineties alternative rock. For those who've heard previous Anton Barbeau efforts, the push and pull between pop and art rock will be as interesting as usual. For newer listeners, the more straightforward numbers here will be more appealing.
PSYCHEDELIC SCENE
by Britta Pejic
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.
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!
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.
INK19
by Bob Pomeroy
Anton Barbeau has been kicking around the music scene for awhile now. The California based multi-instrumentalist has released over 40 albums as a solo artist, in a duo with Allyson Seconds (Kevin Seconds’ wife), and with the Loud Family and the Bevis Frond. For several years he lived in Europe and played with The Soft Boys/Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians stalwarts Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe in Three Minute Tease. Through all these projects, Barbeau explores sonic experimentation and love for a good psychedelic pop hook.
Anton’s recent albums have been focused on heavy conceptual themes of loss and political uncertainty. When it came time to record Come Home To Me, Anton wanted to go in another direction: no heavy concepts, just pure pop songs. He enlisted some help from friends, including former bandmate Andy Metcalfe, and Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory playing together for the first time since the demise of XTC.
Come Home To Me opens (and closes) with a lovely little song about striving for love. Anton sings “I ain’t asking you for something you don’t have. I ain’t asking you for something you can’t give. All I’m asking for is something that the world calls love.” What Barbeau is looking for isn’t a quick hookup but connection and understanding, and that is in short supply these days.
The rocking “You Got Something” continues the theme of looking out for each other. “If you’ve got two feet and you got four shoes. If you’ve got five dollars but you only need two,” Anton sings, making his case for helping those in need. “If you’ve got something, give it, give it away.” It’s not a preachy song, but it is an indictment of the “hog it all” attitude of so many powerful people.
Anton has loaded the album with aspirational pop songs. “Swindon Calling,” (aside from having the coolest name) is about enjoying music and football. “So Many Tears” is the closest to a traditional love song. It sounds like a break up song, with Anton crying because his girl is gone. It turns out she has just popped out to the store to pick up croutons and anchovies. “”Who Wants To Party” is the sort of anthem I can imagine Laurie Anderson putting on when she wants to get down.
It goes without saying that a disciple of Robyn Hitchcock and Syd Barrett would have to do something completely bonkers. “I Touched The Butter” has weird sonic textures, found vocal samples and a mantra about touching butter with his finger. Does it make any sense? Does it need to make any sense?
The music world isn’t a fair place. For the amount of truly interesting music that Anton has released over the past 40 years, he should be better known. It’s a good thing that Anton is motivated by sonic exploration, because these songs just keep coming.
OUTSIDE LEFT MUSIC
by John Robinson
After a series of relatively dark, introspective albums Anton, the raving maven of power-pop, has produced this breezy celebration of music. These tracks weave hooks together in a variety of styles, less conceptual than before, joyful and linked by a spirit of collaboration. Barbeau, born in Sacramento, has lived in the UK and Germany as well, and has worked with members of XTC, Cake, The Pretenders, Game Theory and Bevis Frond. The influence of Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope is clear in most of the output here, with Cope’s collaborator Donald Ross Skinner guesting.
The opener World Calls Love, with guitar contributed by Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory, is a groovy pop song, sixties flavoured, composed like others here from a set of old demos. Somebody to Blame drives along with a 70s style Badfinger sound, sweetly twanging guitar solo and pub rock chorus. You Got Something is an upbeat, optimistic hymn to generosity, with Barbeau’s usual oblique lyrics suggesting a hidden message: “Burn that candle bright, hold the lemon juice up to the light”, alongside suggestions to keep a spare jar of sugar for the neighbour. He may be channelling the surrealism of Leos Carax in the psychedelic sound of Your Holy Motor, the eastern tinged guitar chiming against a funk backdrop.
The City Below starts out sounding like a Rundgren song, pretty harmonies and a rolling guitar line, against a tale of the city and its alienation. “Moon shining down on the city below, I’m all dressed up and I’ve got somewhere to go, I’m a people person”, but “No-one turns around to see me”. The song builds into a rockier section, fuzz guitar takes us somewhere darker before returning us to ground level.
A pretty interlude with interesting soundbites follows - literally Under the Radar - leading into the title track, Come Home To Me, which has a strong riff and a lyric which as often with Anton, seems to be about home, not being at home, missing home and wanting others to remain in his life. “This kingdom once was mine, I’ve got the papers somewhere”, he sings, “I’m open for business, come home to me”. Constant travel between the continents can make constant movement seem like stability and compress your perception of time: “I’ve climbed some mountains in my time, I watched the seas turn back to slime”, he sings, with some uncertainty in his position: “I think you’re going to need to hire a real guy”. “I spilt your sugar”, he says at one point. Jars of sugar feature more than you might expect on this album.
Awkward and Upward has a grungier, darker feel, at first, an interior journey “till the sun turns grey”, “nature has needs” and “I’ll be here all day”. The middle eight is lighter, with bells jingling and an ascending guitar line: the track feels like a description of a psychedelic experience: “inward and onward and away”. It’s hard not to ascribe a similar background to I Touched the Butter, a bouncy song in which Anton touches the butter and is “filthy like the fly”. “Do what thou wilt but harm no-one”. The song has a deliciously fogged up mid section and mantra like ending.
Some Kinda Comfort is a gentle pop song about image, where life is a show, “the actors speak their lines, move around”. He finds a reason for it all though: “because we’re made of love”, which is essentially the message throughout the album, the general answer to “why?”
In So Many Tears the narrator laments a lover who walked out on him, perhaps for being ignored: “She picked up her keys and rushed out the door / I was really engrossed in my headphones, asleep on the floor”. There’s a lovely swirling keyboard throughout this, and the song is more humorous than the topic suggests.
There’s a crack in the light where the songs fall through” is a key line in Swindon Calling, which bears a soaring chorus, backed by an almost Numan-esque synth line. The bridge gently tells us “There’s a happy fellow buzzing round the garden”, with a buzzing guitar solo following. This is the most prog sounding song here, with a mellotron played by Dave Gregory, aka Lord Cornelius Plum.
Who Wants To Party? is just fun, a call and response with horn parts supplied by Terry Edwards (PJ Harvey, Nick Cave). It’s ironic, given the rest of the album paints Barbeau as more of a chill out kind of guy than a party on down dude, but gives the album a lively send off along with the more downbeat All Thru The Night, in which a kettle boils “for the last time in this kitchen”, another reference to moving out or moving on, along with quotes from the hymn, ending with a chill guitar solo and fade out.
Anton Barbeau is certainly under the radar, but a superb pop song writer and lyricist. As ever, the songs here are understated if anything, the lyrics humorous and always self-deprecating, but the calibre of guest artist he can access and the praise he gets from super fans such as Stewart Lee says it all, and should back up my opinion, which is: this is one of his best. Just don’t trust him with your sugar.
MI TOCADISCOS DUAL
by Bernardo De Andres
DISCO DE LA SEMANA
El californiano mantiene su legado en su nuevo trabajo Come Home To Me, que debe ser su infinito lp ya que tiene discos para toda una vida. Tras su fascinante trilogía Dark Mistery Temple del pasado año formada por el oscuro Glitch Wizard (Julio de 2025) al que siguió el más pop Dig The Light (Julio de 2025) para terminar con el más experimental y Kraut , Klaust (Octubre de 2025), vuelve un poco más comedido y accesible sin perder ese lado subversivo y excéntrico . Trabajo de art pop magnifico que recuerda mucho a los discos más pop de XTC ( la presencia de Dave Gregory , Colin Moulding y Andy Metcalfe ya denota por donde se encamina el disco ) . Power Pop psicodélico con viajes hacia todo tipo de terrenos como el progresivo ( Swindon Calling que bien podía formar parte de los Big Big Train ), Bubblegum ( Who Wants To Party ), new wave ( You Got Something ) e incluso P Funk ( I Touched The Butter ). Maravilloso disco Caleidoscópico.
From Google Translate:
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
The Californian artist upholds his legacy with his new release, Come Home To Me—an album that feels like his "infinite" LP, given that he has enough material for a lifetime. Following last year’s fascinating Dark Mistery Temple trilogy—comprising the dark Glitch Wizard (July 2025), the more pop-oriented Dig The Light (July 2025), and the experimental, Krautrock-infused Klaust (October 2025)—he returns with a sound that is somewhat more restrained and accessible, yet without losing his subversive, eccentric edge. It is a magnificent art-pop record that strongly evokes XTC’s more pop-leaning albums (the presence of Dave Gregory, Colin Moulding, and Andy Metcalfe clearly signals the album's direction). It offers psychedelic power pop that ventures into diverse territories, including progressive rock ("Swindon Calling," a track that could easily fit into the Big Big Train catalog), bubblegum pop ("Who Wants To Party"), new wave ("You Got Something"), and even P-Funk ("I Touched The Butter"). A wonderful, kaleidoscopic album.
© Anton Barbeau. Photo of Anton by Karen Eng. Web site: interbridge.
