One of the signs of a truly intriguing band – and that’s intriguing – is the ability for a new album to both provide new perspectives on their previous releases and to retroactively enhance those works. Oranssi Pazuzu’s debut Muukalainen Puhuu was a quirky revelation, a mix of raw-ish, caustic black metal with a truly psychedelic mindset and an almost science-fiction-movie-soundtrack quality to the keyboards and sound effects. To the right ears, it provided as much of a fun/mesmerizing mix as anything else in 2009, and instantly placed the band as one of the more promising young acts among “adventurous” heavy metal. If Muukalainen Puhuu was immediate, sophomore album Kosmonument was anything but. A sprawling landscape, the album opened up the Pazuzu sound, allowing them to fully explore their “space” (multiple meanings implied) and grow in the process. While many praised the album as a triumph, I found it inaccessible, as if they had stretched their sound too far.
Until now.
The second most notable thing about Valonielu, the band’s third, is in how it not only enhances the band’s entire catalog by both combining their varying sound and expanding it, but by how it seems to validate and justify all of the experimentation of Kosmonument. Revisiting the album upon the arrival of Valonielu made it sound brand new and brilliant in a way it never had before. This may be because the occasional “vast” moment on this new work seems to point to Kosmonument as a necessary step in the band’s evolution, but more than that, it is now obvious that everything this band does will be an exercise in growth and maturation. This is a difficult thing to accomplish without occasionally making an egregious error or misstep, but Pazuzu are only getting better and better.
And that brings us to the most notable thing about Valonielu: despite the high quality of their first two albums, this is easily the best album that Oranssi Pazuzu has written to this point, and it truly cements them as one of the most exciting and purely rad bands in metal today.
For those who are not yet familiar with the Pazuzu, know this: this band has both the balls and the talent to do whatever the living hell they want. They will incorporate whatever they influences they deem appropriate into their sound, and because of that talent, none of it ever begins to feel like plagiarism. Already mentioned was their tendency to go a bit Blade Runner OST, a flair established on their debut, and there is still plenty of that here. On Valonielu, the most instantly obvious new element comes during opener “Vino Verso,” where the cyclical riffs and thumping rhythms give off the impression of industrial-era Killing Joke or even bouncier Godflesh going all black metal, and of course the results are pure gold.
“Tyhjä Tempelli” completely shifts the formula with eerie layers of trippy riffs and keyboard effects while a thick bass line keeps the underlying drive going. (That bass sound, by the way, is just one small aspect of a perfect production job: top notch vocal balance for a venomous vocal performance, constant variations in tones, a natural drum sound; it all comes up gangbusters.) “Uraanisula,” the first of the album’s two longer songs, shows off the doomier side of the band for a while, and enhances the top end with some airy, pinched whammy dives. It eventually drops into a meandering passage full of offhanded, lackadaisical guitar lines and a strange sense of improvisation that hammers down an interesting, fun point: this is the sound of Oranssi Pazuzu indulging their “jam” side. Even “Olen Aukaissut Uuden Silmän,” by far the most actual black metal track on the album, does things differently, squeezing a full dynamic range and huge climax into just five minutes.
It’s all a build-up to the album’s finale, the 15-minute epic “Ympyrä On Viiva Tomussa.” Beginning with a very quiet psychedelic passage that would easily have felt at home on A Saucerful of Secrets, it bursts into a direct, driving passage lead by the kind of riff Vangelis might have written for a post/black metal band. Layer builds upon layer to constantly add to the intensity, while a secondary drop-and-build makes sure that tension is part of the formula. The album’s incredible finish eventually takes on the kind of dramatic, cinematic quality that is all too rare. (Similar to Ancestors on “First Light,” albeit using very different tools to arrive at the destination.) An undeniable masterpiece of a song, and the kind of track that can come to define a career.
If the point hasn’t been made clear, every track on Valonielu is a unique experience. Hell, if I had to make a single complaint here, it’s that I would like more of the industrial-styled tracks, or more of the cinematic vibe. An album of this breadth and dynamic quality could easily have taken on another quarter hour of run time without wearing out its welcome. It’s like they’re saying “hey, we can do this, and we can do this, and we can straight nail all of it, but it bores us so we’re moving on…” Who knows… perhaps this is a good thing, as Oranssi Pazuzu finds a way to completely satisfy us while leaving us always wanting more; way more.
This is the sound of a band building a musical legacy that is more than the sum of its individual parts. True, Valonielu is the best part yet, but it is almost paramount that fans track down all three of their full lengths in order to understand and appreciate their relationships. This kind of young catalog – in addition to Oranssi Pazuzu’s unyielding dedication to experimentation and rapid work ethic – really gives off the impression that the great music will keep coming.
But as for Valonielu itself, since it’s really the subject of this review… It wins on so many levels. Get this in your ears.
