Oranssi Pazuzu : Muuntautuja

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Oranssi Pazuzu Muuntautuja review

The difference between metal and its more extreme variants is at its core one of pleasurability: the former is more likely to capitalize on it, while the latter is more provocative by design. If you enjoy it, that’s an added benefit, but testing what you’re capable of tolerating, let alone being entertained by, is more often where this path leads. Since they first opened a portal into a uniquely strange and terrifying universe with their 2009 debut Muukalainen Puhuu, Oranssi Pazuzu have put the pursuit of the extreme into a new context, continuously pushing their psych-metal into more harrowing terrain with each release. The Finnish group extended their tendrils farther with standout releases like 2016’s Värähtelijä and 2020’s Mestarin Kynsi, each one a fascinating and awesome exercise in exploring spaces where few listeners, or even other bands, dare to go.

With their sixth album Muuntautuja, Oranssi Pazuzu have eased off the throttle just so slightly, less intent on covering more cosmic terrain than more deeply exploring the darkest corners of the space they inhabit. The album’s title translates to “shapeshifter,” fitting for a group whose evolution never ends, but which in this case takes on the shape of a colder more austere aural array of horrors. The group has cited influences such as Portishead, Nine Inch Nails and Death Grips going into the crafting of their latest set of songs, and it reflects that intense mixture of industrial and electronic sounds, punishing and intoxicating in equal measure.

The songs on Muuntautuja often evolve slowly, gradually gravitating toward an impending doom that lingers just over the horizon rather than speeding their way toward imminent destruction. And as such, they’re even more unsettling than usual, which says a lot about a band whose greatest moments to date are based around alien parasites growing inside a human host and a tyrannical leader seizing power through occult magic. But from the beginning of “Bioalkemisti,” coming to life through a gradually accelerating series of metallic plinks, Oranssi Pazuzu raise the stakes through oozing synthesizers and screaming layers of guitar—and a growing sense of terror that pays off with a synthetic demon choir in the song’s surging back half.

Though Muuntautuja is more concise than the band’s prior two albums and, for the most part, its individual components more digestible, its palette is one of total darkness, its mood that of sheer menace. The title track takes shape through oscillating tones and distorted vocals, Reznorian piano and high-pitched shrieks, all layered over one another in a trip-hop dirge of the damned. “Hautatuuli” struts with an uneasy gait and a surprisingly deep groove, while the nearly 10-minute “Ikikäärme,” despite its strangely beautiful opening minutes, moves with a woozy lurch, with all manner of metallic noises interrupting like fissures opening in a bulkhead.

By measure of the surface-level elements that comprise a metal album, Muuntautuja is the Oranssi Pazuzu album that falls the farthest outside those boundaries, throbbing with synths and awash in ghostly piano. Yet as the group leans heavier on industrial and electronic sounds, they only come closer to that primal element of fear that’s always been at their music’s core, making that turbulent feeling in your stomach and those prickles on the back of your neck that much harder to ignore.


Label: Nuclear Blast

Year: 2024


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Oranssi Pazuzu Muuntautuja review

Oranssi Pazuzu : Muuntautuja

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