I AM UPSET BECAUSE I SEE SOMETHING

Description

Producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist, Angel Marcloid records music under the name Fire-Toolz. Although Marcloid's production emerges in a litany of aliases and projects – from the fusion jazz / new age of Nonlocal Forecast to the vaporous nostalgia of MindSpring Memories – the Fire-Toolz catalog remains the focal point of the prolific artist's musical universe and a home for Marcloid's most ambitious work. "I am upset because I see something that is not there," the fifth album from Fire-Toolz to join the Hausu Mountain catalog since 2017, follows the sprawling double album Eternal Home from 2021 and the self-produced EP I will not use the body eyes today from 2022. I am upset... offers listeners a prismatic sample of juxtaposed genres and compositional contortions to explore, maintaining the characteristic density and complexity of Fire-Toolz while tightening the scope of Marcloid's experimentation in the project's most focused song cycle to date. Perhaps more than any previous Fire-Toolz album, I am upset... presents a certain form of pop music, carried in Marcloid's clear vocal passages, in the bright synth sounds that animate her tracks, in the nostalgic saxophone lines that pour into view and take the narrative down a new path. The format of a "one-person band" carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting modernist productions that make no allusion whatsoever to the various traditions related to 20th-century rock. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide. The music of Fire-Toolz draws its energy from the constant fluctuation between seemingly disparate styles, yet Marcloid repeatedly achieves the impossible feat of making chaotic deviations and improbable jumps between ideas sound holistic, as if such compositional gambits were already logical from the outset. Bursts of harsh textural noise cut into new age synth bliss, while screamo verses end with hyper-technical fusion jazz passages.