Game Theory – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E37: The Salt Collective

The Salt Collective, photo from Bandcamp

The Salt Collective formed in 2016 with songwriter and guitarist Stéphane Schück, guitarist Ken Stringfellow and lead vocalist and keyboardist Anton Barbeau. The core group was joined by bassist Fred Quentin and drummer Benoit Lautridou and released a debut album The Loneliness of Clouds in 2019. Schück had come up with an appreciation for American jangle rock and power pop and he and Quentin and Lautridou became friends during high school in Caen, Normandy, France. The trio formed a band in their college years but Schück and Quentin went onto careers in medicine and Lautridou in education. In the 2000s Schück contacted one of his musical heroes on a lark and received a letter back. Which is how he came to work with Scott Miller of acclaimed Paisley Underground-affiliated group Game Theory to produce a demo. The two would go on to co-write a few songs brfore Miller died in 2013. But Schück wasn’t done making music and when he started making music with Stringfellow of influential power pop band The Posies and former Miller associate Anton Barbeau it seemed that the songwriter had a knack for crafting songs as well in the vein of the musicians that had inspired him.

The group shrank to a trio by 2022 but by then it had begun working with The dB’s singer/guitarist Chris Stamey, bringing in another circle of the band’s influences. Stamey in turn was able to help bring aboard collaborators for recordings including the likes of Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Sweet. Mitch Easter, Richard Lloyd, Susan Cowsill and Matthew Caws. The group’s subsequent records have continued an ambitious type of pop songwriting and its latest A Brief History of Blindness (released November 21, 2025 on 12” LP, CD, digital download and straming via Propeller Sound Recordings), is a bit of a concept album about how we as humans approach the world we try to navigate as best we can. The contributors to the new album include Lynn Blakey of Let’s Active, Mike Mills (REM), Aimee Mann and Andy Partridge of XTC as well as some of the aforementioned. It is a vibrant record that expands beyond the power pop roots while honoring the level of songcraft of the group’s most obvious influences.

Listen to our interview with Stéphane Schück on Bandcamp and follow The Salt Collective at the links below.

The Salt Collective on YouTube

The Salt Collective on Instagram

The Salt Collective on Bandcamp

The Salt Collective on Propeller Sound Recordings

Anton Barbeau’s Psychedelic Power Pop Single “Waiting On The Radio” is a Soothing Dose of Sanity in Less Than Sanguine Times

Anton Barbeau is one of those musicians still very active and prolific whose roots stretch back to American and international underground music with great creative distinction if not household fame. He has worked with the great neo-psychedelic band The Bevis Frond, he has collaborated with the late, great Scott Miller of The Loud Family and Game Theory fame, and for the new album his guest performers include Colin Moulding (XTC), Andy Metcalfe (Soft Boys/Robyn Hitchcock’s The Egyptians) and Chris Stamey (dB’s). That new album being Morganmusik/Nachtschlager which released on September 22, 2023. The lead single “Waiting On The Radio” features Barbeau on a trip on a bus across the country bemoaning the tire on the bus being busted yet taking solace in the promise of hearing “something golden” on the radio. In the story we get updates about how the driver should have retired years ago but in this America needed the money to get by and how everyone on the bus including himself is losing patience. But Barbeau and the band take us into gloriously beautiful psychedelic passages of expansive melody. It’s the kind of power pop song that made the first wave of “college rock” in the 80s so rewarding with tight yet imaginative songcraft that could resonate with frustrations of everyday life yet provide the kind of emotional release that was both soothing and captivating. Yet the song doesn’t feel like a throwback. Rather, it highlights how everyone has static in their lives that they have to get through and it needn’t feel like some end of the world inconvenience. It’s a very sane song in less than sanguine times. Watch the video for “Waiting On The Radio” on YouTube and follow Anton Barbeau at the links below.

Anton Barbeau on Instagram

Anton Barbeau on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E5: Sleepyhead

Sleepyhead is a rock band that formed in New York City in 1989 at a time when the underground rock of the 1980s in the USA and the UK flowed into what became alternative music by the 90s. But for a brief period Sleepyhead began in the golden age of the indiepop that that one heard in the music of the C86 bands and on Sarah Records. One might have heard echos of the Paisley Underground in the music and of criminally underrated groups like Game Theory and Let’s Active. But Sleepyhead had firmly established its own vibrant musical identity by the time of its 1993 debut album Punk Rock City USA on the even now respected forward thinking pop imprint Slumberland, home to the likes of Black Tambourine, Peel Dream Magazine, Weekend, Papercuts and The Reds, Pinks and Purples. Musical history may remember Sleepyhead in the same company as Chicago’s Material Issue whose own legacy of great pop songwriting and great energy and intelligence and warmth informing the songwriting was critically acclaimed at the time but largely neglected since. With a bit of an extended hiatus following the 1996 album Communist Love Song, Sleepyhead returned with 2014’s Wild Sometimes and a strong reminder of how Sleepyhead’s sharply observed lyrics and creative songwriting concepts remained intact. In 2022 the group, a trio of Rachael McNally, Chris O’Rourke and Derek Van Beever, released New Alchemy, named for the New Alchemy Institute, a research center that did work in organic agriculture, aquaculture and bioshelter design and operated between 1969 and 1991. It was the sort of very pragmatic, sustainability research steeped in the ideas of thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller that the world could honestly use more of in the face of the multitude of challenges we face with the climate and adapting economic thinking toward something more rational and nurturing not just of the planet but of our own civilization and individual lives. The music is graced with that great shiny jangle guitar work and exquisite vocal harmonies that have made Sleepyhead’s music standout from the beginning and with it a freshness and exuberance that hits the ear as something wholesome and nurturing yet subversive in weaving in heady ideas and focusing on songcraft over adhering to a trendy style. Every song makes great use of space while also brimming with a fortifying denseness of detail and musical ideas. Classic Sleepyhead and a welcome entry in the catalog of one of the great bands of the alternative era.

We had a chance to speak with the band and you can listen to that interview on Bandcamp and to connect with Sleepyhead visit its website where you can find links to listen to their music including New Alchemy. Before the interview you can check out the music video for the single “Pam and Eddie” on YouTube.

sleepyheadrockband.com