Angine de Poitrine – Vol II

Spectacles Bonzai

I have it in my head that I reviewed Dsilton for Freq but my memory may be wrong. Why mention another band from the off? Well, in lots of senses Dsilton is what you’d expect from microtonal music with conventional instruments (guitar, keys, drums). Loads of crunchy intervals, odd rhythms and a faintly queasy feeling. They’re very good. But they’re not very popular. And partly that’s because they’re very clearly music school graduates who make difficult music with a very expanded sense of harmonies (that also marks it as more-jazz-than-noise).

Angine de Poitrine are in many ways opposed to that. It’s surely very studied music but not necessarily studious. Competent and well-delivered and clever, but still with an idea that audiences can sometimes have a funky groove, as a treat. I imagine the Freq hordes by now have seen their KEXP performance that seems to have set the internet on fire — dressed in ridiculous polka-dot outfits and singing in some made-up language. I guess that’d put them adjacent to something like Magma.

Though perhaps with a catch — this is very approachable music. It’s on the moderate side of the math rock equation — there’s definitely odd and shifting time signatures, but most of the tracks have a kind of tension-building that resolves to a clear kick drum pulse, often in fours. Where the microtones are used it’s typically as transitional notes — perhaps analogous to the 4-♭5-5 of blues (ie, transitioning from a 4-5 with a semitone in between) we get something more like 4-5-♭5-5-5 (ie, 4-5 in quartertone steps).

A wee note also — ‘microtonal’ is sometimes a contested term. I’m using it here because this music is very much similar to 12EDO [equal divisions of the octave] traditions, though it’s using 24EDO. Microtonal is insufficient to describe tuning systems to (say) Arabic music, where the various notes sometimes written as “half-flat” (eg ) are not precisely sitting between a semitone. For my money, ‘microtonal’ is a division based on physics (ie, an octave divided into 1000 cents), which isn’t quite the same as a musical division, which can be fixed (as in 12EDO music common to the West) but isn’t always (again, Arabic music doesn’t have a strict tuning system).

Angine de Poitrine playing in a fixed system commensurable with microtonality makes them microtonal IMO, but it’s also worth saying that unlike the aforementioned Dsilton, this is music which is “12EDO + some dirty quarter tones” — it’s not the same as a blues bend (often not precisely a quarter EDO tone) and it’s not the same as Dsilton who really dig into the murk of harmonic systems afforded by 24 EDO.

So within that it’s worth saying that Angine de Poitrine are often a lot of fun. UTZP does a great job of floating between a space-polka dissolving into dissonant a mess and then a b-section which is principally not too far from a proper four-to-the-floor rock band like Queens Of The Stone Age. The quartertones add just enough bite to stop it being asinine and the solo is acidic enough to be satirical rather than crypto-Queen, but it’s still resolutely rock music.

Perhaps that’s emblematic of why their KEXP performance has really struck a nerve on the Internet — enough weird to draw people in, enough standard rock stuff to keep people from switching off. It being often loop-based there’s a kind of stasis that the arrangements have that may well push them into people’s brains — rather than a jazz approach of play-the-idea-once-and-leave, arrangements sit well in a kind of neo-krautrock vibe. Not quite nailing the riff to death, but certainly enough groove to keep the ears perked up without assaulting them too much.

I wonder also if there isn’t enough of clean tones + funk to draw a kind of post-punk afficionado in — it’s not PiL, but it’s got enough snotty volte-face to appeal to appeal to a Swell Maps or Birthday Party fan. I’d say there’s just enough metal touches (the breakdown on “Yor Zarad”) to appeal to the headbanging faithful also.

Also worth noting — one of my overwhelming gripes with loop-based music like this is that it takes forever to get going. Angine de Poitrine have made a real virtue of getting to the point quickly. They’re super tight. “Mata Zylek” (the one you know from the KEXP performance) gets to its point quickly despite having a load of layered parts. Closer “Angor” does a great job of bringing to mind desert rock and perhaps even Iron Maiden-esque parallel solos over six minutes. If they’re virtuosi, they’re definitely virtuosi of layering samples.

It’s kind of amazing just how popular that KEXP performance is and, correspondingly, how much their first album goes for. UK shows are sold out already, so they’re very much a hot ticket in 2026. It is a shame, for me, that it’s them and not Dsilton; but that is a bit apples and oranges — Angine de Poitrine do a bang-up job of investing some new life into the old rock beast.

-Kev Nickells-