Muuntautuja means “shapeshifter” in Finnish, which is the most accurate possible description of what Oranssi Pazuzu do on this record. The Tampere quintet have been building their particular synthesis, krautrock’s repetitive hypnotic drive combined with black metal’s corrosive extremity, layered with synthesizers that sound like transmissions from something very far away, since 2009, and on their sixth album they’ve stretched that synthesis past the point where genre tags are useful. This is not black metal with psychedelic elements. It’s something that uses black metal the way black metal uses its own influences: as raw material for something new.
“Bioalkemisti” (Bioalchemist) opens the record with the band’s established vocabulary, a pulsing, motorik rhythm underneath guitars that sit at the boundary between a riff and a texture, and then moves it somewhere new. The track builds in layers rather than through conventional dynamics, each element arriving at its own pace and gradually displacing the one before it. By the time it reaches its peak you’ve been inside it long enough that the peak feels like confirmation rather than arrival.
“Muuntautuja”, the title track, is the album’s most alien moment: the vocals shift in approach mid-track in a way that feels genuinely disorienting rather than merely experimental, the rhythm section turning in on itself while the synths push the track into frequencies that don’t belong in metal. “Vierivä usva” (Rolling Mist) closes the record with the album’s most expansive stretch, over ten minutes that function as a landing sequence after an extended drift through something strange.
The production is dense and layered, no single element dominates, which is appropriate for music this committed to treating every instrument as equally important. The black metal guitar tones are present but processed beyond their usual role, sitting inside the mix rather than on top of it. Synthesizers carry more of the melodic weight than on previous records, which shifts the album’s center of gravity away from the guitar and toward something more genuinely psychedelic. Dynamics operate through texture rather than volume.
Standout tracks: Bioalkemisti, Muuntautuja, Vierivä usva
There are perhaps five bands in the world doing what Oranssi Pazuzu do, and none of them do it this well. Muuntautuja is the record that confirms them as one of the most genuinely strange and genuinely essential bands in heavy music right now.
