An 80-minute epic blending screamo, jazz, prog rock, IDM, and more, the latest from producer Angel Marcloid offers some of her most focused and welcoming material amid the chaos.
Fire-Toolz’s work has always felt designed for life indoors. Listening to Chicago producer Angel Marcloid’s psychedelic splatters of new age, prog metal, vaporwave, and digital noise captures the distinct feeling of growing up online, with the entire history of recorded music just a keyboard click away. As with similarly minded artists like Galen Tipton and 100 gecs, Marcloid depicts the internet as a place where leaping between genres is as easy as switching tabs, the line between “good” and “bad” taste is all but meaningless, and you can let your personal soundtrack get as weird as you want from the safety of your headphones. The internet often acts as an incubator for our hyper-specific tastes to develop unfettered, a place for personal expression to take on wild new forms as we find our own niche communities that accept us. Marcloid’s music incorporates that boundless freedom and unleashes it like a modern take on an epic, confessional GeoCities blog post, full of typos and spinning unicorn clipart.
The fantastical world-building of prog rock has always figured in Marcloid’s personal mythos, and bands like Rush and Dream Theater act as a guiding light for the Fire-Toolz project with their arcane sci-fi lore, highly technical compositions, and shamelessly excessive approach to songwriting. On Eternal Home, Marcloid offers her own take on the prog-rock epic: an 80-minute purging of ideas that melds screamo, smooth jazz, and IDM as if they were always meant to be together. This long-form project is a dense proposition from an artist whose music was already overwhelming to begin with, and parsing through the album requires dedication. However amid the chaos lies some of Marcloid’s most focused, welcoming material yet.
Although following the themes of Eternal Home will require a lyric sheet to comprehend Marcloid’s distorted shrieks, a close listen reveals the album to be a search for self-fulfillment and purpose, narrated from the isolated confines of the house. From the first moments of opener “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈,” chintzy synth chords clash in all directions as Marcloid muses about mundane tasks like doing the dishes, shouting pissed off affirmations like, “I’m owed strength now” and “I’m not paying for a mantra.” In Marcloid’s hands, being a stay-at-home stoner is a journey of self-discovery. “Lellow< “Birbs<” contrasts suburban imagery of neighborhood puppies and “macho sports dad-isms” with a gradually intensifying blastbeat, culminating in a simple, spoken-word declaration: “It’s always a nice day when we can be nice together.” It feels absurd, and yet Marcloid has a way of making these words sound completely earnest, like a kid screaming for peace from the cruelty of the playground.
One new development on Eternal Home is Marcloid’s use of clean vocals as opposed to her usual black metal howls, with the best moments finding ways to make the two styles work together. "Thick_flowy_glowy_sparkly_stingy_pain.mpeg'' opens with an absolutely decimating shriek before launching into an unholy nu-metal blast of Deftones by way of Cocteau Twins, layering glistening harmonies over pounding guitar riffs. “Where on EARTH Is My Sacchidānanda?” is even more accessible (at least by Fire-Toolz’s standards), leading a triumphant shoegaze charge as Marcloid sings and screams about having “sampled everything there is to learn” in her quest to find bliss. It feels like an anthem for the Fire-Toolz project as a whole, the melodic vocals making her trademark growls feel all the more powerful.
Moments like these manage to fold Marcloid’s far-reaching ambition into surprisingly sharp songwriting, but it’s hard for the more wandering material to sound quite as exciting in comparison. For every stunner like “I Am a Cloud,” an uncanny valley acoustic power ballad recalling Oneohtrix Point Never’s work post-Garden of Delete, there are oceans of head-scrambling glitch collages that end up coming across like sonic vomit. It’s fun to get lost in the delirium of it all, but the album works best on a choose-your-own-adventure basis, dipping from one batch of tracks to the next like switching between Discord channels.
In the spirit of prog rock, Eternal Home is as ambitious and cerebral as it is self-indulgent; but unpacking these strange, messy depths has always felt like the whole point of Marcloid’s music. All of her searching yields some dazzling results—the thrashing blackgaze climax of “Odd Cat Sanctuary,” the lo-fi emo serenade “To Make Home, Be Home,” the playful MIDI sound that rolls through “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window.” As the album winds down with “To Make Whole, Be Whole,” Marcloid confronts the ways that happiness can alway seems out of reach, running off a checklist of taxes to pay, medical work to be done, and distant places to eventually settle down. For Marcloid, home is an ever-changing state. As uncomfortable as it may be, there’s beauty in the way Fire-Toolz embraces this turbulent state of flux as the real destination.
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