Fire-Toolz - Eternal Home [CD]

Over the past two decades, producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has willed a vast ecosystem of music into existence at a rate that somehow seems to intensify as time goes on. Various solo monikers, collaborations, and band memberships stand as monuments in the landscape, focusing in on certain styles associated with each project — the Weather Channel jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast, or the hazy vapor nostalgia of Mindspring Memories, to give a few of many examples. The music of Marcloid’s flagship project Fire-Toolz sits as the bottomless pit in the center of the lush environment, drawing ideas and signifiers from all corners into its depths. In keeping with Fire-Toolz’s role as the outlet for Marcloid’s most overloaded and audacious compositional gambits, Eternal Home enters the catalog as the longest and most ambitious Fire-Toolz album to date. Clocking in at close to 80 minutes, Marcloid improbably maintains the attention to detail and the crushing density that has come to define Fire-Toolz from its inception, treating the expanded canvas as an opportunity to both dive deeper into genre-obliterating chaos and to tighten the reins around more direct, even accessible styles of songwriting. While Eternal Home builds on the omnidirectional compositional styles that Marcloid explored on previous LPs, the album gains power and momentum from its sheer overwhelming mass, becoming a statement of purpose that showcases all the reliable strengths and unpredictable left turns that Fire-Toolz continues to refine with each new work. Despite Fire-Toolz’s penchant for heady genre-mangling, advanced production techniques, and potentially overblown levels of instrumental virtuosity, Eternal Home coheres into a cathartic journey that transcends any intellectual hang-ups to crest into deeply emotional, ineffable zones.