Every fan has a different way of describing the absolutely bonkers music that Angel Marcloid makes as Fire-Toolz. Her songs are effortlessly virtuosic and unapologetically epic, built like a web woven by a caffeinated spider, as she screeches over fidgety riffs and dazzling synth runs. Some might call it vaporwave; for others, it’s primarily black metal, or jazz fusion. Here’s my take on it: Fire-Toolz is progressive metal, an internet-brained update on bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, whose albums are like novels for a certain kind of nerdy metalhead. On her Warp debut Lavender Networks, Marcloid runs with these inspirations to build a record more like a classic ’80s metal LP—ballads, riffs, heroic journeys—rather than the fidgety freneticism of her past work. Relatively, of course.
Warp is not a major label, but it might as well be for an electronic artist, and Lavender Networks functions like an ideal major-label debut: Everything is bigger, shinier, and more focused, with collaborators outside her usual wheelhouse, like Zola Jesus and Nailah Harper. The UK institution reached out to Marcloid after she released Breeze, which underlined the jazz fusion and electronic aspects of the Fire-Toolz sound. She wrote the music on Lavender Networks around the same time, but it’s a syncretic microcosm of her entire discography. Songs are more self-contained, and the detours feel more natural, as she speeds through sections of black and death metal, scorched-earth electronics, and the kind of keyboard runs that Keith Emerson might write if he was working for The Weather Channel.
Lavender Networks begins with a magnificent, multi-part suite: a chilled out-intro followed by a black metal crashout that’s blindingly bright. “Quintessential Fixed Width Unfoldment” is kind of Yes, kind of Liturgy, and all Marcloid, especially in how it dips into a gorgeously lazy drift and unravels into a krautrock outro. That turn would be a major highlight on a normal record; here, it’s one of approximately 15 head-turning moments. Another one: “The Ocean Gratitude Cylinder Peace Necklace Lemonade Flying Free,” which trades the fusion proggery for straight-up black metal riffage, with a little deathcore thrown in. But lest you think the song is merely a genre pastiche, a ripping saxophone solo (borrowed from a No Joy recording session) comes in to lend it a certain sexiness, a corpsepainted hesher wearing a tuxedo.
Marcloid’s music is often ridiculous, but it also feels honest, like a genuine reflection of her diverse tastes and desire to combine them all. Her lyrics can be as flighty and diffuse as the songs themselves, but here they’re poetic and vulnerable. Lead single “Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head” was inspired by a cat Marcloud followed on Instagram, whose death touched her so much it brought on an existential episode. Over an instrumental that sounds like a Return To Forever track on steroids, all muscled up and nervy, she screams lines that feel wrenchingly poetic and wonderfully melodramatic: “When your body-mind slipped through our fingers/You came back to us as tears/Your reflection in droplets from your mother’s eyes.”
Some tracks are ugly, like “A Demon & Its Spinal Cord Flapping in the Wind,” inspired by a horrifying vision Marcloid had as a child and sounding like an angry ghost trying to escape from a 100 gecs song. And “[CODENAME_SPARKLY LAGOON LAN LINE]” is like slime-era Morbid Angel wearing cybernetic armor, with nonsensical lyrics that roll off the tongue: “Slippery, sodden, silky surface/Ice hot stream twinkles and swimming is the same as floating.” There are more elegant tracks, like “Pleasant Valley Magic Cube of Holiness,” sung by Marcloid’s wife, and the closer “Dear Robin Bears & Love Cloud ’24,” a paean to the birds in her backyard that calls back to Fire-Toolz side project Nonlocal Forecast.
Marcloid has worked under many different aliases that have let her explore softer styles, and that softness has in turn begun to surface on Fire-Toolz records. The centerpiece of Lavender Networks is one of her prettiest tracks yet. “And Where Is the Heart? I've Searched My Entire Home” features a vocalist who Marcloid discovered after hearing royalty-free music in a YouTube video. She tracked down Jennifer Holm, a musician and self-described “church mommy” from Nashville, and asked her to sing over a gliding track that feels almost giddy, moving at a more human speed than Marcloid’s usual hyperactivity. As she sings of being struck by the beauty of the mundane, Holm’s voice is a clarion call of stability, cutting through the usual Fire-Toolz chaos.
“And Where Is the Heart” is so striking because it sounds content, almost grounded, compared to the hectic musical freak-outs we’re used to from Marcloid. Almost 10 years into the project, Fire-Toolz likely still sounds crazy to anyone who’s new to Marcloid’s world, but Lavender Networks is a step up on the “approachable” scale—even if it still has enough ideas for a dozen albums by a less adventurous artist. It’s a (relatively) digestible, catchy release that seems destined to invite more people into Marcloid’s digital dayglo world, where black metal is rapturous, jazz fusion goes really, really hard, and every aspect of life online and offline is fodder for strangely beautiful poetry.
