Album Review: Oranssi Pazuzu

Album Review: Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja
Reviewed by Dan Barnes

Finnish psychedelic black metal band, Oranssi Pazuzu issue their sixth record, Muuntautuja (or Shapeshifter if English is your first language) this month, and are continuing with their unrelenting journey through the darkly avant-garde, they started back in 2007.

Taking the title of the album literally, Oranssi Pazuzu have crafted a record that is protean to its very core. Nothing is as it seems and, though the foundations are very much Black Metal, to call Muuntautuja such would be to significantly underplay much of what is going on here.

Bioalkemisti begins with unsettling electronics and sets the tone for the whole of the record. This is not going to be plain sailing as the fuzzy riff and industrial keys quickly attest. Lovecraftian soundscapes rise and fall, increasing the atmosphere and tension with every grind and every scream. Vocals are demonic, the music like a Transylvanian wind, swirling. The closest this comes to being grounded is the Mayhem-like mid-section, which probably says all you need to know.

The title track picks up the industrial electronics, replacing the snarling vortices with a low hum; the demonic narrator replaced by an android voice, only to descend into to a slithering oozing BM rasp. Plunging riffs and a post metal vibe, coupled with some odd instrumentation add to the disquiet, yet one cannot but help to think of Pink Floyd.

The unusual instrumentation rears its head again on Hautatuuli, which seeks a more ambient aspect; against a simplistic bassline and a trilling guitar, we are greeted by a whispered vocal, casting spells and invocations against a slow and steady progression. It’s only at the mid-point that the restraints come off and the tune takes flight on wings of whirling keys.

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Each of Muuntautuja tunes is a very different experience, adding layers of creativity with each track. Be that the fast and furious riff of Voitelu, where Oranssi Pazuzu’s more straightforward approach to their art is as unnerving as the more outrageous aspects found elsewhere; to Valotus’ whirling and thrashing in a storm of Black Metal cacophony. Raw and visceral, Valotus pummels and punishes in equal measure and is so Devilishly evils as to compete with any corpse-painted horde the continent might have to offer. A light-hearted piano finds an odd bedfellow in the form of a low hum, before hammering riffs generate an infernal atmosphere, leading one to suspect the Fifth Angel had sounded his trumpet and the bottomless pit had been opened.

The longest song here is also Oranssi Pazuzu at their creative peak. Ikikäärme clocks in a just short of ten minutes and brings together all the ideas heard so far. Light piano lines and a low hum suggest a machine whirring into life; the protean nature of the record is writ-large: industrial BM becomes Noise and hellish chanting take one onto a trip into the Twilight Zone where nothing is as it seems. Evoking the unnerving atmosphere of Blut Aus Nord’s MoRT, Ikikäärme is also Muuntautuja most adventurous amalgamation of soundscapes; at its central point it begins to coalesce into a recognisable whole, its own accretion disc spinning into form in the vast emptiness of the cosmos. By the climax the alien voices heard as the tune draws to a close are no longer Other, rather they, like us, have become a part of the whole.

Final track, the instrumental Vierivä usva, acts as an extended coda to the album, as Ikikäärme has already said everything Oranssi Pazuzu needed Muuntautuja to say.

In the vein of Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega and The Axis of Perdition, Oranssi Pazuzu revel in the creation of shocking, unsettling albums; but I suppose that’s what Black Metal is supposed to do: make you fear for you very soul. I rather think Muuntautuja will give up its secrets slowly, though it’s a journey fraught with peril, the risks are worth it.