Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja (Review)

This is the sixth album from Finland’s black metallers Oranssi Pazuzu.

Since discovering Oranssi Pazuzu on 2016’s Värähtelijä they have been a band that easily stood out for me. Mestarin Kynsi followed in 2020, another album that took an expansive, creative vision for blackened music and explored it with engaging results. Which brings us to Muuntautuja, the band’s shortest album at 42 minutes in duration. What scintillatingly expressive sights and sounds does it has to offer?

All of the pitch black ones, apparently.

I’ve always enjoyed Oranssi Pazuzu’s very individual and unusual brand of psychedelic blackened soundscapes, and Muuntautuja is a fine slab of warped nightmare given aural flesh. Each album brings something different, and Muuntautuja is a bringer of darkness.

Oranssi Pazuzu play a not-really-black metal style laced with post-rock, trip-hop, progressive rock, and avant-garde psychedelia, and enhanced with elements of experimental, noise, and electronica. It’s creative and mood-rich, yet Muuntautuja also has to be one of the band’s most catchy and hook-laden releases yet. Balancing atmospheric depth with atypical hypnotic appeal is not easy, and yet here it seems effortless.

Oranssi Pazuzu manage to simultaneously sound like themselves and something new. They have been mastering this seeming contradiction for a whole now, and Muuntautuja expresses this paradox well. These new songs spread their shadowy wings and soar and dive through the band’s past material, gathering or discarding what they want to fuel their metamorphosis. The end result sounds exactly like Oranssi Pazuzu, yet is also its own novel entity.

Oranssi Pazuzu are a rarity in extreme music, a unique endeavour that continues to forge a path where others cannot even conceive of travelling. Muuntautuja stands alone as a world of psychedelic darkness, awaiting discovery and exploration. Don’t miss out on this experience.

Essential listening.