Next up we’ve got a few albums that gaze into the depths of the digital void.
Fire-Toolz – I am upset because I see something that is not there.
Angel Marcloid has become a fixture of the musical underground over the past decade. Although she makes music under a number of monikers, Fire-Toolz is the most prolific and perhaps best known one. Most Fire-Toolz records are the aural equivalent of a Geocities website, an amalgam of Y2K aesthetics and whiplash sonic collage. I am upset because I see something that is not there. represents the latest refinement of that sound. At times Marcloid’s compositions feel vaporously abstract, only to suddenly turn into prog rock epics. Strains of smooth jazz, hard rock, and the project’s signature black metal vocals all shift in and out of focus, all framed by intricate soundscapes. A Fire-Toolz album has always been adept at creating a sense of information overload via its own idiosyncratic vocabulary, but I am upset because I see something that is not there. may be the most focused and pop-forward the project has felt to date.
Stice – Crime Wave
I was blown away by Stice’s Satyricon, the last album by Stice. At the time of its release I likened it to a seedy message board set to music, an endless scroll of content serious and frivolous swirling together in profane glory. On its surface their latest missive, Crime Wave, is more of the same, capturing the same giddily demented highs as its predecessor with the same mix of raunch and humor. But, believe it or not, there are also some signs of maturation. Heard front to back, it has a bit more shape than their previous work; instrumental interludes sprinkled throughout provide perfectly timed moments of relief from their songs’ onslaught. As a whole, it feels like the group’s most fully realized statement to date.
Richard Youngs – Modern Sorrow
Both of the albums we’ve discussed so far have taken a maximalist approach to representing our digital reality. On his latest album, the prolific British experimentalist Richard Youngs takes an entirely different approach. The two side-long compositions that form Modern Sorrow move at a glacial pace, each built upon simple repeated musical phrases and wordless auto-tuned vocals. These vocals are at the core of what makes this music so affecting; they seem to cry out over and over again across a vast wasteland, searching for a response that never comes. Though it does so abstractly, it’s music that seems to speak to the loneliness of our era better than anything else I’ve heard this year.