Anton Barbeau is releasing his new album Power Pop!!! today, via Big Stir Records. The new collection features 19 tracks balanced between fully formed songs (including the lead single Rain, Rain) and a handful of fascinating interstitial miniatures.

The title of the album 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!"

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.

Check it out now clicking on the image.