ANGINE DE POITRINE - Vol. II

Some records you listen to, others you inhabit. “Vol. II” by Angine de Poitrine belongs to a third category: the kind that sucks you into an alien orbit and forces you to learn a new system of gravity.

Klek and Khn de Poitrine, brothers in concept and musicians who've shared the same trench for twenty years, show up in polka-dot black-and-white costumes and papier-mâché masks with phallic noses. It looks like a performance art prank straight out of Warhol's Factory during an acid trip. And in part, it is: their very name, Angine de Poitrine, is in fact the medical term for angina pectoris, the chest pain that precedes a heart attack. They're almost a living oxymoron: music that stops your heart, and music that jump-starts it back to 200 bpm.

But the real show is under the fingers. Khn wields a double-neck guitar — half bass, half guitar — hand-modified with extra frets cut with a saw and glued on. The standard Western octave (12 semitones) is here split into 24 quarter-tones. It's not a lab-rat quirk: it's the very language of the record. The notes normally found between the frets (a D half-sharp, an E half-flat) become the protagonists, not the extras. And yet, miraculously, it all remains digestible.

The Western ear recognizes each note as distinct, not as an out-of-tune version of a familiar interval. The result is music that seems to come from a nearby planet, yet still gets your feet moving as if you were still on Earth.

The album opens with "Fabienk", a simple 7/8 that morphs into a maze of out-of-phase accents and syncopated rhythms. By the third minute, the bassline turns into a Seventies disco groove. The duo has perfected a maniacal system of live looping: the guitarist builds layer upon layer with a Boss RC600 (a MIDI master that sends a click to the drummer's metronome), and every section change is a surgical pivot, a gear shift that never dismantles the rhythmic edifice.

"Sarniezz" is the record's nerve center. A hypnotic, dissonant bassline over which Khn layers serpentine microtonal lines that seem plucked from a feverish dream. Then, halfway through, the track explodes into a funk–metal frenzy: Klek's drumming shifts from swing to four-on-the-floor with an ease that betrays twenty years of complicity. But there's something for every taste: "Utzp" starts as a Balkan folk jam, almost circus-like, with melodies that sound as if plucked from an out-of-tune accordion. Then, without warning, it turns into a wall of distorted guitars and heavy bass. "Angor", on the other hand, is the toughest track: an anger that simmers without ever boiling over, a loop of tension coiling in on itself like repressed anxiety. It ends in feedback, with no catharsis. It's probably a comment on the forced resilience of our times, leaving the listener suspended, almost unsatisfied.

The duo's viral live performance (courtesy of Kexp) has a physicality that here, in the studio, can feel a bit muted. And yet, "Vol. II" is genuinely a work of high quality. In a rock landscape where innovation is often just a marketing label, Angine de Poitrine have built a genuinely new language starting from a simply insane idea: playing the notes that aren't there. They don't do it with conservatory solemnity, but with a clown's humor and a surgeon's precision. The costumes aren't a clickbait gimmick but a Dada manifesto: depersonalizing themselves so the sound can emerge, making the body transparent (even the exposed skin is painted in polka dots like the costumes) so that only the music remains. And the music, on "Vol. II", is a living organism: sometimes chaotic, sometimes repetitive.

In the end, the album closes as it began: with a loop dissolving into silence, and the feeling of having been transported somewhere. You're not quite sure where, but you know you want to go back.

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07/04/2026