Oranssi Pazuzu voyage beyond black metal to a sound all their own on the new Mestarin Kynsi
When I wrote about these Finnish xenonauts last October, on the occasion of the only stateside tour in their 13-year history, I called their music “wormhole black metal”: “Oranssi Pazuzu plunge you into a tunnel of fatally deformed spacetime, bathe you in a sizzling cocktail of exotic radiation, and spit you out somewhere cold, dark, alien, and very, very far away.” I stand by the wormhole metaphor, but the band’s brand-new fifth album, Mestarin Kynsi (“The Master’s Claw”), has me rethinking the “black metal” part. Over the years they’ve drifted so far from the genre’s familiar signposts that wherever they are now, they’re alone out there—and I can’t ask for more from musicians than that they grow to sound like no one but themselves. You’ll waste your time hunting for frosty tremolo-picked guitars, blurry blastbeats, and sandpaper shrieks on Mestarin Kynsi.