Review: Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja
Metal clangs slowly form a rough rhythm, giving way to a set of pummeling percussion, oppressive synth tones, and the commanding tone of a beast. The rhythm you hear, a menacing sway that pounds away like an irregular heartbeat, remains foundational throughout what can only be referred to as a brutalist wall of sound. As an album opener, “Bioalkemisti” is immediately hypnotic and imposing, cutting through the soul with a power unknowable by man.
Oranssi Pazuzu are not new to tapping into this power, mind you. The band’s back catalog is that of a collective crafting a unique take on avant-garde metal. Beginning as space rock vis-a-vis black metal outfit, Pazuzu developed their sound into a psychedelic, dissonant powerhouse. Somewhere between Sigh, Esoteric, Amon Düül II, Blut aus Nord, and far too many other bands to list in this paragraph, the group has incorporated a large number of influences into an ultimately unique sonic ethos. This evolution reached a major point at 2020’s Mestarin kynsi, an insanely intoxicating black metal album that shared far more compositional DNA with krautrock than Mayhem. It was this album that cemented the group as masters of atmosphere and songcraft, while also helping lay the groundwork for what was to come. When finally able to perform material from Mestarin post-lockdown, the band utilized noise to add more to the weight and dynamics of a track like “Taivaan portti.” Bassist Ontto describes this as “…a necessity to reinvent the way [they] were writing songs,” adding that, “[they] really felt [they] wanted to shed the old skin and find new angles.”
This intent rings clear throughout the runtime of Muuntautuja, as every song is enveloped in dizzying clouds of feedback and abrasive synth tones, slowly accumulating above each vignette, until they surround the band in a thick haze. This emphasis on tonal and textural complexity adds further dynamics to an already dynamic-sounding band, regularly washing the palette with harsh drones without losing the flavor brought by the rest of the instrumentation. It’s a delicate threshold to get right, but one that is incredibly rewarding to the listener. For example, the build-up of “Valotus” is otherworldly, crescendoing from abstract black metal to an earth-shattering harsh-noise-wall-adjacent finish. These new sonic elements also grace Pazuzu‘s brand of psychedelia-via-repetition with supporting flourishes, smoothly transitioning from foreboding, meditative atmospherics to avant-garde metal accented with the screeching howls of a beast not of this plane.
The album title Muuntautuja translates from Finnish to mean “shapeshifter,” signaling the themes that this record contains. The planes-walking monster mentioned earlier is said shapeshifter, manifesting in Lovecraftian forms throughout each segment of this auditory anthology. These are stories of control, conflict, the cycle of rebirth, and the interdimensional horrors that lay at the center of it all. These setups can be interpreted as the various visages the Muuntautuja takes to explore its ever-expanding dominion. These depictions of chance encounters with the elder-god-like specimen lie more in the album’s sound than it ever could in our limited, mortal tongue. At its most suggestive and hypnotic moments, the influence and control of the Muuntautuja can be felt in the very soul of the listener—ensnared in the ebbs of the abyss. At its most intense and all-encompassing, Muuntautuja sounds like the last moments of a human mind going mad when shown incomprehensible stimuli from beyond. The record uses these different modes to lull the listener into a state of suggestibility, making the bombastic moments of musical madness hit with the power of a freight train.
In addition to the conceptual monster contained within the 43-minute runtime, the signifier of “shapeshifter” applies to the band themselves. In the lead-up to Muuntautuja‘s release, promotional materials and interviews with the group talked up their eclectic influences and desire to incorporate new ideas. In the presser, Pazuzu cites a few metal bands as influences, while also detailing left-field inspirations like Death Grips, Boredoms, and Portishead. Citing such out-there influences is usually indicative of a band that has lost the plot, for lack of better words. Yet, with the record in question, one can hear most, if not all, of the cited genesis points in Muuntautuja. Whatever elements of black metal remain in the Oranssi Pazuzu concoction share the runtime with the unraveling song structures of Nine Inch Nails, the hazy guitar tones of a band like My Bloody Valentine, the abrasive textures of the Japanoise scene, and complex near-industrial drum patterns that are reminiscent of Zach Hill’s work with Death Grips and Hella (the works of NIN and MBV were cited as influences as well).
These borrowed ideas culminate into an incredibly powerful listen, one that creates a complete picture of its own concept. Muuntautuja represents a monolithic presence in auditory form, with each song effortlessly escalating towards terror like the last 30 minutes of a remarkable horror movie. It’s another groundbreaking work from Oranssi Pazuzu, while also managing to be their most immediately arresting work to date. Its ability to entrance the listener into a place beyond space and time is second to none—it just so happens that this void inhabits a timeless being of oozing malevolence.
After “Ikikäärme,“ the album’s longest and most expansive track, the record closes out on the fittingly titled “Vierivä usva,” which translates to “rolling fog.” Unlike the pounding build-up of the album opener, “Vierivä usva” is the obfuscated expanses of this dimension that the cryptid Muuntautuja dwells in. It’s a harrowing ambient track, one that shows an expert sense of sound-craft. One could very easily imagine this as a strange form of calm after becoming one with the great beast of the beyond. Vocalist Jun-His describes this record as a “sculpture made of black electric ooze.” If so, the last 5 minutes of Muuntautuja is the listener being submerged in this substance, being incorporated into its transcendental murk.
5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Muuntautuja is out now through Nuclear Blast Records.
