Review by Sonny for Oranssi Pazuzu - Värähtelijä (2016)
In the world of black and blackened metal there are some fantastic innovators, but there are countless more tedious copycats. It is a world of a few genuinely original artists and legions of less talented wannabes endlessly churning out the same old shit. Needless to say, Finland's Oranssi Pazuzu are most decidedly one of the former.
According to counterculture lore, the hippies' psychedelic dream died at Altamont on 6th December 1969. If that's the case, then sometime during the early 2010s Oranssi Pazuzu disinterred it's partly-rotted corpse, breathed new life into it and bent it to their own nefarious purposes. The result is Värähtelijä.
The Finns take the sound of psychedelic and space rock and, by utilising some infernal alchemy, fuse it with the aesthetics of black metal to produce a hypnotic, disorienting aural landscape that is so suited to early 21st century life and the disconcerting (and possibly paranoid) feeling a lot of us get that "something is going on". OP's version of pysychedelia isn't love, peace and beautiful trips with rainbows and unicorns. No, theirs are the baddest of bad trips, threatening and disorientating. Anyone who has been a devotee of classic 60s UK TV series The Prisoner (yes, the one sampled on Maiden's Number of the Beast album) will never forget the fucked-up final episode that left everyone scratching their heads. Värähtelijä is to black metal what that episode was to British TV - disturbing, scary and absolutely mind-blowing (man!).
The album could be described as cosmic black metal, where that cosmos is not only awe-inspiring but also threatening in an indeterminable, Lovecraftian kind of way. The music is repetitive, but never boring. Instead it uses repetition to hypnotize the listener in a kind of ritualistic manner, while the electronics and black metal stylings, especially the vocals, induce an atmosphere of discomfort and unease to achieve the album's intention of unsettling it's listener, a goal to which any Black Metal artist worth their salt should surely aspire. Black Metal isn't meant to be comfortable and predictable, yet too often it is, so bands like Oranssi Pazuzu who can get under your skin and upset your expectations should be valued most highly by any real BM devotee.
Värähtelijä was my personal introduction to Oranssi Pazuzu, who are now one of my all-time favourite black metal acts, and ended up being my AOTY for 2016 as well as a cast-iron five star classic and one of the great black metal releases of the new century.