Their masks light up now. To the extent there was a hard news event from Wednesday’s exhilarating sold-out New York debut of Angine de Poitrine, that was it. The Québécois duo went viral in corners of the internet earlier this year thanks in part to their microtonal, odd-metered take on hard-driving rock, but also because of those ostentatious costumes and masks – black and white polka dot tunics and jumpsuits with oversized papier-mache faces and exaggerated features, originally featuring golden glittery eyes and signature pyramid accoutrements. The new ones have all those same things but with the added ability to light up in a bright yellow at key moments.
A small detail, to be sure, but one got the sense that the weeknight crowd was reveling in it and many others at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge (LPR) – an appropriately French-named venue given the band’s home province. Wednesday was the first of the band’s two shows at the 700-capacity basement venue renowned for its sound system and commitment to adventurous programming. Both Angine shows had been sold out for many months, ever since a video of them playing in a French studio was uploaded to KEXP’s YouTube channel and went viral. At time of writing, the video is closing in on 20m views – a remarkable tally given that the music, by mass-appeal standards, is so magnificently odd.
While their success came suddenly, Angine de Poitrine had spent years perfecting ways of expanding small details into fully formed musical themes, using them to bring new life to the repetitious riffs that form an ever-evolving backbone of each of their lengthy songs. Added to the outfits, the masks, the double-necked guitar/bass, even their consonant-heavy song titles and stage names (Klek, drummer, and Khn, guitarist/bassist) and commitment to near-total anonymity, they have created an intoxicating mystery. Listeners are left free to wonder what this mysterious duo are playing, why it sticks in the mind like a pop song despite its timings and tunings, and how the hell they are physically able to play it with all that stuff on them.
Seeing them live might have answered some of those questions, but it also raised others. The band’s signature sound is defined by dearth of reverb and sustain – would deadened drums and defined guitar play in a noisy concert hall? Their signature image is that of aliens who have beamed into a studio with no rough edges. Would that play once you can see the cables emerging from out the back of their costumes? With such little difference between the album and in-studio live versions of their songs, and their expert use of live looping creating few opportunities to vamp, would the live concert even be worthwhile?
Yes, it absolutely would. The band emerged in full regalia to a roar, packed in under LPR’s low-slung ceiling. They blasted their way through Angor, the closer from Vol II, the second of their two albums, then raised the bar with Yor Zarad, another of that album’s ferocious highlights. Tamebsz, from the 2024 release Vol I followed, for the first time making use of the light-up masks to guide the audience in an especially complicated game of call-and-response. The songs had not especially changed from how they sound on their albums and in-studios. The ability to finally see the duo’s superb musicianship up close carried the show – as did the reminders that they are still human. How does a musician performing in a giant mask take a drink of water? Through special water bottles with comically long, glow-in-the-dark rubber straws.
Three-quarters through, though, the perils of live performance intruded. Khn had broken a string. And when you break a string on a specially built two-necked guitar/bass with custom microtonal frettings to access notes between the western scale, well, it’s not like you can borrow somebody else’s. And given their costumes, it’s also not like you can change the string yourself without difficulty. Khn required the help of a guitar tech to guide a replacement string through the back of the instrument, all while Khn himself partook in an impromptu jam with Klek using the other strings on the instrument. When that string change didn’t take, the duo figured they had delayed long enough and launched into Sarniezz – by necessity, the only time some of those signature riffs rendered a bit differently.
And when they unplugged and left the stage, no encore followed, and none was demanded. Questions had either been answered, or pleasantly remained.
