It’s quite evident, upon listening to pop wunderkind Anton Barbeau’s latest, that he’s been traveling quite a bit lately—though the trips he’s been taking haven’t involved a plane, or a car, or a train, or any other form of conventional transportation you’d care to name. In the Village of the Apple Sun is easily the most colorfully amorphous psychedelic long-player since the Dukes of Stratosphear came floating down the pike. If you like your music conventional and linear, you’ll likely be frustrated by Apple Sun—far better, instead, to “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” Barbeau’s pure pop instincts frequently come shining through, such as his channeling of the Thin White Duke-era Bowie in “This is Why They Call Me Guru 7,” or “The Bane of Your Existence is My Name,” where he quotes from Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.” The Donovan-meets-Robyn Hitchcock title track is arguably the most conventional song on the disc, until the rush of a backward-recorded guitar solo rockets the proceedings into another orbit altogether. Elsewhere, however, things are far stranger: the inscrutable lyrics of “When I Was 46 in the Year 13” or “On a Bicycle Built for Bicycle 9” are surpassed only by their unconventional instrumentation and liberal use of bizarre sound effects. And “Coffee Pot” and “Bane Projector” are unquestionably the most literal song titles of this or any other year. The album closes with “My Hair is Oily”—imagine, if you will, a drunken singalong at a pub full of hairdressers. It is, in essence, a microcosm of the disc as a whole--does it make any sense? Hardly. Is it a good time? Hell, yeah.
~ Rick Schadelbauer
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