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.
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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.”
