Behold the future.
O.K., O.K., I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I must have lost my marbles, because these guys are obvious lunatics, and they play utter crap. Just look at those ridiculous costumes! Polka-dots! All over! Even on the skin of their hands, and on the guitarist’s bare feet – my God, the dude is on stage barefoot. And what a ludicrous, bare-bones, repetitively primitive sound they make! What is this?? Make it stop!
That’s what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought too, at first, but bear with me. There’s something going on here. These guys are a sensation and coming on strong, and not just with the music-buying public. Perhaps astonishingly, serious musicians are all over social media talking about them excitedly, just about all of them not only taking this band seriously, but describing them as innovative, ingenious, and bleeding edge. This reaction from Rick Beato, famed YouTube musician, producer, commentator, and pop-music curmudgeon, is pretty much typical:
This is what I always thought the future would sound like, says a flabbergasted Rick.
There’s a number of things that Angine to Poitrine – which is the French for the heart condition we refer to as angina, for some unfathomable reason – are doing differently. Much, much differently. To begin with, all of that sound is being made by just two people, both of whom come across, and not just to this untutored observer, as complete masters of their instruments. The big, multi-layered sound that eventually emerges is achieved through the use of some sort of computerized looping technology, not pre-recorded, but activated on stage. Watch: the guitar player lays down a line, then pushes a foot pedal, I’m guessing to start the loop playing, and then proceeds to layer another part on top, and then another, alternating as he goes between guitar and bass on his unique, home-made, double-necked instrument. In the creation of their unusual sound, it’s especially significant that this is no regular guitar (quite apart from being double-necked); it’s microtonal. This is from the Google search results:
“Microtonal” simply means that the guitar has many extra, narrowly-placed frets, creating gradations of playable notes between the seven of the standard scale, allowing the player to create a unique sort of sound that regular instruments can’t duplicate. With all the layering of loops – watch how often the guy’s bare feet are pushing those pedals – it winds up sounding positively futuristic and even hypnotic. Meanwhile the drummer, his eyes just visible behind a slit at the bottom of his false, floppy-nosed head, manages, without showing off, to make it all hang together with intoxicating rhythms that always serve the music.
At first you’re taken aback, maybe even repelled, by these bizarrely iconoclastic weirdos. But then, if you just sit back and listen, hey what do you know, there’s actually something to it. Maybe a lot to it. This is, in fact, a highly-evolved form of performance art, and seems sly, humorous, and knowing without devolving into nothing more than the joke it might at first blush appear to be. They’re just too damned good to be written off. If the absurdist, possibly satirical elements of their presentation are meant to serve as some sort of wry comment on the ridiculousness of pop music fame, and what it takes to even get noticed amid all the canned, AI-generated glop spewing these days out of Spotify and Amazon Music, well, good on ’em; and if I’m missing the point entirely, never mind, good on ’em anyway for attempting whatever the hell it is they’re trying to get across, because whatever they’re doing, it’s fascinating, and boy, does it ever grab you by the collar and demand your undivided attention. Above all, Angine de Poitrine is an ice-watery shock to the system, a real kick in the pants, much as Pete Townshend smashing his guitars back in the day used to be shocking and scandalizing (that was performance art too), and they’re shaking things up bigly.
At the moment, indeed, they’re viral. Maybe their schtick will grow old in a hurry, I don’t know, but whether they stick around, or vanish in short order without a bubble, I very much doubt they’ll be forgotten, not within the community of musicians anyway. Whatever happens, I expect you’ll be hearing their influence informing all sorts of acts down the road, as everybody scrambles to latch on to this new way of making electric music, adopting elements of the first really novel approach to popular composition that we’ve heard in a long, long time. It’s exciting.
Insane, maybe, but exciting.
the needlefish 