Oranssi Pazuzu : "Värähtelijä"

The Finnish band's fourth album finds the band having drifted further out this time into the sonic seas of the psyche. The vocals scream out from the jangling chaos that still manages to be as heavy as black metal, perhaps even more so than the previous album. If you are going to open an album with a 12-minute song this is how you do it. It keeps building like a flood that is washing you away. At the nine minute mark things break down, but stay very dark and driven. They take on a droning groove not unlike one Swans might employ on "Lahja" the low rasped gurgle of the vocals scowl up from the darkness, before they take you into a much more chaotic abyss. The fact things stay so dark really helps the case for the title track. The guitar lets up even further on the tone and strays away from the typical metal over drive which is a welcome change and allows the guitar lines to develop more melody. But where the two songs that follow the opener don't live up is in the compositional sense. They are looser jams that tend to hang on the one them, it works better on the title track than the previous song and isn't a complaint as much of an observation.

They return to a more black metal attack on "Hypnotisoitu Viharukous". This doesn't let up until past the song's midway point and the guitar backs off into a shoe-gazing-like slathering of effects with the fuzzed-out bass left to do most of the dirty work. The song that follows this one finds the bass player once again as the song's cement providing a strong rubbery groove for all the other craziness to erupt over. This is heavier in more of a sludge-like manner than black metal, the only element that remains black metal lies in the vocals. The song does descend into a sprawl of white noise that might have been time put to better use. The builds back up into a slow crazy noise-covered groove, that makes me think of the supergroup Twilight. "Havuluu" keeps things on the crazy train, as it spirals into a dizzy drone that slowly gets heavy each cycle downward. They prove they haven't forgotten about black metal, and even if they revert to the blast beat it's an effective use of the dynamic.

They back off into more exotic tones for the closing song. This is largely noise and droning until midway into things as it builds up and grow darker. The beats are more tribal and less groove-oriented, if you are on a ton of drugs I suppose it would put you in a trance. I like the mood they create, but it's not as engaging as the first song. This album comes on strong and the band has forged a new path for themselves that finds this closer to black metal than their last album, but sometimes gets lost in the confusion of its own sonic maze. This is an impressive feat in and of it self and your perspective of this depends on if you need songs or you need a trance-like state for yoga on acid. I'll give it a 8.5, the first song has everything I could want from black metal, so it sets the bar too high for the rest of the album. Check the song below and decide for yourself when 20 Buck Spin unleashes this on Feb 26th.