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Five months ago, we watched as Angine de Poitrine – microtonal sensations from Saguenay, Quebec’s fertile DIY rock scene via…I dunno, somewhere in space – sent a jam-packed Electric Ballroom into a state of feverish glee. Since then they’ve raked up millions more streams, made their US talk-show debut (The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon) and sold out increasingly massive spaces across the globe.
That London debut caught us by surprise, in the best way – a proper rock show and a thousand times more fun than we imagined such a fiendishly clever, angular duo could be. Do they pull off the same trick tonight? In a word: yes.
Support band/fellow Quebecois rockers Gros Mené kick things off with a pleasingly all-over-the-map melee of punk, psychedelic, blues, hardcore and alternative sensibilities. It all makes a weird, oomphy kind of sense. If All Them Witches came out of a garage in Detroit, instead of Nashville, they might have sounded like this.
Delighted cheers rise and spotty balloons fly over heads as the curtain rises to reveal our pyramid-saluting headliners – resplendent and slightly homemade-looking, like characters dreamt up by a primary school teacher (after a particularly hefty spliff). It’s an oddly wholesome backdrop for hard-stabbing opener Angor, its hypnotic math-rock, prog and ancient scales layered with dizzying dexterity.
Yor Zarad is their mad French-Canadian answer to Focus, intense but giddy, drummer Klek’s long nose flailing between beats, guitarist/bassist Khn stepping back and forth as if in a dance with his pedals. It’s like being suddenly thrust into a psychedelic, high-energy party at some kind of alien souk.
It’s pretty much the same setlist as the one we saw in May, but now with an expanded vocabulary of distorted “eryhjjhthturrrhgtuhh!” declarations between songs. You wonder if there’s a code in these garbled exchanges (two short “urrhgtdddttjtk!”s for “oh fuck my drumstick's stuck!”, or somesuch thing), either way it unites the happy roomful gathered here.
It *is* a less boisterous crowd compared to the frenzied mob at the Ballroom – as you’d expect from tonight’s wider demographic and capacious, high-ceilinged setting. Still, everyone’s quite ready to bob along in unison on command, ADP’s non-verbal offbeat panto showmanship transcending language and culture boundaries.
Crowd-surfers start to flow around Mata Zyklek, ADP’s virtuosic chops and eastern sensibilities reaching banger-grade rockability. Intense but full of silly fun, frenetic then fluid repeat patterns with nods to Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Indian and other old world musical traditions.
Ababa Hotel is a jazzier funk affair – the band going a bit Dave Brubeck on us for a moment – leading into a gloriously bizarre call n’ response “EEEE!” “ARGGGHH!”, proof that even 333-year-old otherworldly beings can do hammy old-school theatre.
Much loved fan favourite Fabienk sees the room descend into full-scale alien disco boogie. Everyone bounces and sings along with the guitar hook. We lose count of the spotty outfits, headgear and hairdos around us, as Sherpa stirs up a heady cloud of eastern hoodoo and tight, twisted oomph for an all-out rock climax.
You do wonder if this’ll all turn out to be some feverish cheese dream that we wake up from in, say, 2028 and go “Hey, remember when we were nuts for these weird instrumental dudes with absurd oversized heads? What the hell was that??” But even if that did happen – whether Angine’s reign ends tomorrow, or years from now – we'd look back on it as a brilliantly eccentric moment in music history.
That said, they have got two London nights booked for next summer, so it’s not over just yet.
