Angel Marcloid’s previous full-length album as Fire-Toolz, I Am Upset Because I See Something That Is Not There, was a rarity: an actually scary album in the pantheon of heavy music. Screaming in and of itself is not frightening; distortion is not scary. But there was something about that record’s explosive Lisa Frank-on-mushrooms iconography, its haunting evocations of vaporwave, and its blazing, distorted hyperpop that sounded like the intensity of scream-pop auteurs 100 gecs multiplied in a way that could only be expressed in factorial notation. It sounded like you would expect an LP with the words “I Am Upset” in the title to sound—a little off-kilter, a little ironic, but fully invested in the expurgation of the superego.
In its harshest moments, it sounded like the furious offspring of grindcore and eccojams; the quieter, burbling electronic parts sounded like a Reddit thread about post-genre music come to life. Like Ari Aster’s Midsommar, it was disturbing in a bright and colorful new way, creating space to exorcise anxiety by bathing it in technicolor acid. What could possibly follow in the wake of this music, which sounded like the end of music or the end of the world?
On Breeze, the first full-length Fire-Toolz album since I Am Upset, Marcloid demonstrates the capaciousness of her fiery imagination. In short, she asks the one question that could surprise the listener: “What if things are actually going to be kind of okay?”
Breeze is the sunburst-colored patchwork quilt to I Am Upset’s frenetic neon collage. As one project among Marcloid’s many musical ventures, Fire-Toolz is still an experiment in absolute profligacy where genre is concerned, but it’s more in tune with the rhythms and frequencies of everyday life. Marcloid says that the songs on Breeze sprouted in her move out of Chicago proper and bloomed out of the joys of domestic life, and the listener can hear this in the opening affirmation.
“Please, I’m not ready to die,” Marcloid screams over the warm synths of “Everything & Everywhere Is Grace; Heaven Is a Decision I Must Make”, before dropping a guitar line straight out of a Deafheaven single. This is still a very loud and complicated song, but the new message is that it’s okay to live with another person and love them; it’s OK to take joy in the little moments that keep you going. “The dishwasher opens and closes, opens and closes, opens and closes,” Marcloid screams, and then the saxophone hits, blazing across the waves of distortion like a spiritual visitation.
None of this should be taken to mean that Fire-Toolz has abandoned noisiness and rage. “To Every Squirrel Who Has Ever Been Hit By a Car, I’m Sorry and I Love You” features deathcore collaborator extraordinaire Nylist offering some of the harshest bellows on a Fire-Toolz release to date, while ethereal vocals by Lipsticism weave in and out of the mix. “That Makes a Lot of Sense. Given What You’ve Been Through” and “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window” are defined by their uncharacteristic clean vocals, working in concert with warped and burbling synths, and the latter track features another glorious saxophone solo, this time by experimental sax conjurer Cole Pulice.
“The Envy of the Heavenly Powers”, on the other hand, is pure death metal chaos, complete with deep, growling vocals and squealing guitar harmonics. “Sibling Sun, Sibling Moon, White Concrete Steeped in Celestial Light” swings back in a more ambient direction, drawing inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” to create an almost tender ballad driven by an acoustic guitar. Fans of Liturgy, the avant-metal band fronted by Haela Hunt-Hendrix, will probably note a number of commonalities between Liturgy and Fire-Toolz, the clearest of which may be a shared interest in exploring spirituality through genre-fluid music.
“Thin Neck of the Woods” is a largely electronic instrumental track that leads into “Labyrinthian EMDR”, which, with its four-on-the-floor rhythm section and arpeggiated synth lines, is arguably the most club-ready and danceable metal-adjacent song that you will hear this year. Blast beats and industrial synths return on “RE: Official Request for Reciprocal Indwelling Procedure”, which digitally bleats its way into the soaring, vocoder-inflected ambience of “Asparagus Pee, SETI, and the Gift of Tears”. Breeze frequently repeats this on-and-off switch between harsh and delicate tracks, as if Marcloid is pursuing something analogous to the Tao of heavy experimental music.
The following track, “A Considerate Amount of Pining, an Invasive Species of Spiritual Anguish, Some Kind of Knot to Tie, Sitting Tight, Peering Between Planks, Palms Are Sweaty, Mom’s Spaghetti” (your mileage with Marcloid’s song titles will vary), seems at first like it will buck this trend, whispering with shimmery synths until breaking into a guitar arpeggio that wouldn’t have been out of place on a mid-2000’s emo album. “A Considerate Amount of Pining” packs a number of sonic ideas into six minutes that is either astonishing or overwhelming depending on the listener’s appetite for controlled chaos, veering between genres every 20 to 30 seconds and featuring yet another saxophone player, SPIRAL’s Joseph Trahan.
The final three tracks conclude Breeze not with a bang or whimper but with the rush of a jet engine taking off into the unknown. “It Is Happening Again (Enmeshment as a Winged Spindle)” combines trebly eighties-style guitar work with skittery electronics into an eclectic ballad that would not be out of place on a Oneohtrix Point Never album, and “The Pain-Body (Child Synergy Tears)” reflects Marcloid’s documented love for the post-rock/emo band the Appleseed Cast, building a glass castle of twinkling guitars and reverb-heavy clean vocals. The closer, “Removed from Everything & Everywhere Is Grace”, combines all that came before into a sonic bouillabaisse of electric piano, church organ, and blast beats, finishing on a piano solo that escalates in chaotic intensity before trailing off into a short musique concrète collage of dog and cat sounds. It’s a lot to take in.
Fire-Toolz is a project built on a foundation of contradictions, but these are contradictions that work. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, the ecstatic concatenation of instruments, genres, and noises on Breeze looks like it shouldn’t add up to anything comprehensible, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is—like a room-sized apparatus for putting toothpaste on a toothbrush—to draw the listener’s attention to the gloriously convoluted details of process over product. Upon a casual listen, it might seem as if Marcloid is throwing sonic ideas at the wall to see what sticks, but an attentive ear reveals her care and attentiveness as a producer, where every disparate sound is held in place right where it belongs like the pieces of a multicolored Jenga tower.
We are living in a golden age of Bandcamp-hosted experimental metal, and Breeze has spiritual predecessors in the work of bands like Liturgy, Igorrr, and Mr. Bungle, but the fact remains that nobody makes music quite like Fire-Toolz. It’s a rare artist indeed who can turn tools for expressing existential dread toward a grateful appreciation of life, but Breeze accomplishes this exact move by reproducing the glorious unpredictability of everyday life in ecstatic musical bricolage. It turns out that there isn’t any irony in screaming the phrase “Be not afraid,” as Marcloid does on Breeze’s penultimate track. Sometimes, a scream is the best way to make those words sound believable.