Music and Album Review: Angine de Poitrine Vol. ll.
By Dr. thomas p. hunterson
There are albums that whisper, albums that shout, and then there is Angine de Poitrine Vol.II, which appears to cough up its own lungs, set them on fire, and declare the ashes an insolvent nation.
From the very first track, you are not listening so much as being conscripted. The rhythms stumble in like drunken revolutionaries who have forgotten both the cause and the slogan, yet remain deeply committed to overthrowing something. Time signatures dissolve on contact. Melody behaves like a fugitive. Harmony is less a system than a series of polite misunderstandings. It is, in short, a triumph.
The production sounds as though it was engineered inside a collapsing cathedral. Instruments loop, and are phased in and out of existence like unreliable narrators. At one point, roughly, approximately, spiritually around the middle, you may become convinced your speakers are breathing. This is normal. This is intended. This is the album achieving eye contact with your subconscious and refusing to blink.
Lyrically (if we accept “lyrics” as an imposition on raw vocal exorcism), the work rejects linear meaning in favor of what I can only describe as “microtonal alien Dadaist jibberjabber.” Phrases never emerge, but contradict themselves and then dissolve into phonetic riots. There are moments where the “voice” sounds like it’s filing a formal complaint against language itself. The complaint is upheld.
Angine de Poitrine is not merely music, it is direct action. It dismantles the bourgeois expectation that sound should be pleasant, or even coherent, and replaces it with a thrilling regime of aesthetic uncertainty. This is not anti-music, it is post-obedience music. It refuses to serve. It refuses to resolve. It refuses, at times, to even exist in a stable format.
And yet, paradoxically, it grooves, not in any way that would suggest dancing, unless your idea of dancing involves negotiating with gravity, but in the deeper sense that your internal organs begin to synchronize with its chaos. Your heartbeat attempts to meld with the percussion. Your thoughts start staging walkouts. By the final track, you are less a listener and more a temporarily occupied territory.
Is it good? That question feels embarrassingly reformist. Angine de Poitrine is necessary in the way that a storm is necessary, or a glitch, or a sudden, inexplicable urge to quit your job and communicate exclusively through abstract shapes.
In conclusion: five stars, zero stars, all stars redistributed equally among the instruments. A masterpiece, a mess, a manifesto. Do not recommend it to friends unless you are prepared to lose them, or radicalize them into a new, noisier form of being.
