'Psychedelic black metal' as a genre label had me suspicious from the start - maybe just a result of my recent turn in taste away from 'atmospheric' to more 'riffy' music. Listening to the music, it's hard to find any other way to describe it. Oranssi Pazuzu are a Finnish band, so the themes in their music remain mostly a mystery to me. Perhaps that's a part of the appeal. The album cover has a man in a spacesuit and one of the track names includes the year 1968, so I'm going to assume the moon landing comes up at some point. I've had this album recommended to me several times, and having finally gotten around to it, found it a pleasant surprise.
Oranssi Pazuzu are certainly a unique band. The production is rotten, but a much-appreciated carefully rotten - a style I particularly like. The focus is definitely on sound-scapes, with blastbeats and so-on used sparingly, but well. Funny little synth warbles abound (or is that fucked-up guitar noise?) Drumming is generally sparse. Most of these songs don't generally strike me as rock songs per se; repetitive drumming with minimal use of cymbals means the drumming doesn't drive the music forward so much as hold in a kind of (psychedelic!) trance. Vocals are a standard black-metal shriek, appropriately distorted and/or recorded through a shitty mic. Some of the guitar sounds are a very pleasant surprise to me: clean lead guitar! Repetitive (and quite audible) bass lines contribute to the cosmic trance thing.
This isn't album for those who want to rock-out; with a couple exceptions (the track in the middle with the stupid long Finnish name) the songs stick to a mid-paced groove. As if to beat us over the head with the idea, the title track is a bunch of ambient noise. Solid melodies are also few and far between, though when they do come in, usually in the form of one of those aforementioned clean lead lines, they are creative and interesting, with little bends and warbles going on. All this is not to say the album is just a wash of 'atmospheric' white noise, however. I find this album much more engaging than your typical 'atmospheric black metal' nonsense, probably owing to the band's refusal to partake in navel-gazing tremolopickingandblastbeat black metuhl riffage. While some sections are repetitive, they're never boring; the band manages to add and subtract elements at a sufficient pace to keep the listener's interest. If I had to make a criticism it would be that the songs and the album as a whole don't really seem to go anywhere. It's hard to tell where one track ends and another begins, and the pace of all the songs seems quite similar. The instrumentation was engaging enough to keep my interest, but I kept waiting for some sort of catharsis or climax that never came. A strong melody, a section of sudden intensity, something of this sort would have been welcome.
I would recommend this album to any fan of creepy, atmospheric music, and not necessarily just black metal; I think fans of dark ambient or more experimental psychedlic/progressive rock would find a lot to enjoy here. On the flip side, I would also recommend it to black metal fans who generally look down upon 'atmospheric' black metal, as I think it's a good example of how other things can be done with the genre without making it boring. Also, if you're Finnish, everything will probably make a lot more sense to you.
4 spoopy spacemen / 5
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