The Mind Melting Five: ORANSSI PAZUZU - Mestarin Kynsi Review
The masters of some of the most thought provoking and original explorations that fall under the seemingly ever-expanding black metal moniker, a term that is now saddled with enough adjacent sub-genres to infuriate the purists, are back with their latest offering of intense nihilistic rage, washed through a depraved filter of electro grandeur and trademark psychedelic terror.
Making their Nuclear Blast debut, Mestarin Kynsi (The Master’s Claw) represents ORANSSI’s fifth full-length release since the band’s inception late in the 2000’s. Following up 2016’s essential Värähtelijä, and together with the highly acclaimed Roadburn collaboration turned studio album with DARK BUDDHE RISING known as WASTE OF SPACE ORCHESTRA (delivering the album Syntheosis in 2019), ORANSSI PAZUZU have kept a relentless schedule spanning the past 18 months. Their latest release finds the outfit continuing to expand on their sound, finding new crazed electronic textures to add to an already unique artillery. The band has successfully pioneered its own brand of space rock psychedelia cloaked in black metal mystery, and Mestarin Kynsi manages to see the band evolve further in ways only they could. At times suffocating in its dizzy, chaotic apexes, other times hypnotic and trippy with woozy synths and pulsing bass lines – there is an ever-present sense of unease and dark tension that consumes this entire listening experience. It stands as a shockingly fitting audio reflection, and perhaps disastrously coincidental, of this moment in time of panic and fear that is gripping the globe.