Angine de Poitrine react to winning the Polaris Album Prize and the SOCAN Polaris Song Prize at Massey Hall in Toronto, on Tuesday.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
On Tuesday, Quebec experimental rock duo Angine de Poitrine, after taking the indie-music world by storm this summer, won the $30,000 Polaris Music Prize for the album Vol. II. Not only that, they took home the SOCAN Polaris Song Prize for Fabienk, a six-minute angular funk workout that only Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes could dance to.
The costumed pair posed for a picture with the idiosyncratic rocker Jack White backstage at Toronto’s RBC Amphitheatre in July. Chances are it is the only photo in existence where the strangers from Saguenay, Que., aren’t the weirdest people in the shot.
The masked drum-and-guitar duo is anonymous, clad head-to-toe (literally) in polka dots. Claiming to be “space-time voyagers” with no interest in bloated arena-rock excesses, they say they make music for music’s sake, and that hoopla is for humanoids. As it’s put on their website: “Angine de Poitrine are simply thrilled to play rock ’n’ roll.”
Why is Angine de Poitrine, Quebec’s masked, math-rock band, blowing up?
Clearly, the thrill has been reciprocated. At a sold-out concert at Toronto’s Mod Club in July, the crowd pulsed as one to instrumental music that is asymmetrical, dissonant and improbably catchy and accessible. The guitarist − Khn de Poitrine, a pseudonym − uses looping pedals and plays a microtonal double-neck guitar. Extra frets allow for guitar lines that are foreign to people’s ears.
Not everybody is buying it.
“It’s microtonal, which means it’s out of tune,” legendary Canadian guitarist Frank Marino told The Montreal Gazette this summer. “If you take a pop band who wrote a lot of hits, like the Beatles or the Bee Gees, and if you take off their mop-tops or take off their hula hoops, you get rid of all the visuals, the songs are still the songs. But if you take these guys’ clothes off, there’s no song. There’s nothing to remember.”
Angine de Poitrine fans react as the duo performs at the Polaris Music Prize Awards.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
Pop-culture writer Chuck Klosterman’s new book, Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music, is a work of speculative non-fiction, based on the premise that the Velvet Underground, not the Beatles, became the most fab band in the world.
The book about music criticism and appreciation questions the randomness of success. “Why are some things perceived as being artistically valid and other things are not?” Klosterman said in an interview with Publishers Weekly. “Is it the product itself? Or is it the world around it?”
Angine de Poitrine would be a good case study. Why has their self-described “Dada Pythagorean-cubist mantra-rock” struck a chord with audiences? Or with the Polaris jury of more than 200 Canadian music insiders?
ROB Magazine: How Angine de Poitrine’s global success benefits their friends at home in Quebec
The answer to the latter question is a mystery. The Polaris jury does not put out citations explaining their choice of the best Canadian album of the year. As for the former question, I can take a guess: There’s a purity about them. Despite the surface shtick, it’s unfashionable music they’re making. Rooting for them is like cheering for E.T.
People are cynical and suspicious. Some have attributed the success of last year’s breakout rock band Geese to fake fans and an orchestrated psyop. Music lovers wonder why someone such as the singer-songwriter Stella Lefty is being foisted on them out of nowhere. Manipulated algorithms? If elections can be fixed, as a certain U.S. President has claimed, surely Spotify can be rigged, too.
So, perhaps Angine de Poitrine is a breath of fresh air, all organic. Their ascension to popularity is so out of left field that no one would be crazy enough to contrive it. That’s one explanation. The other is that their oddball groove just makes people feel well. Apologies to the conspiracy theorists − no dots to connect here.