One aspect of metal I always found particularly curious was its reliance on nostalgia. Look back to the origin mythos of the genre, Black Sabbath’s song “Black Sabbath” off their debut album, Black Sabbath (and people say there’s no humour in metal); the track is an ominous, slowed-down blues track that imagines a demonic entity – possibly the devil – visiting a village, likely during the dark ages. It imagines a past which, by all accounts, never existed, and even though its atmosphere is quite frightening, there’s also a romantic longing for this gothic experience, which sits at the heart of a particular melancholy.
Now, pick any other significant metal album – be it funeral metal, Norwegian death metal, even post-metal – and you will find a running thread of melancholia, which harkens back to some lost world or ancient experience that modernism has evolved out of, the past tossed aside like a shedded skin. Younger interpretors of the genre, such as Trhä or Liturgy, even create complex systems of new languages or intricate cosmology that harkens back to prior iterations of our cultural status quo. Imperial Triumphant even conceived their vision of unique dystopian megalopolis, set somewhere between Blade Runner, Metropolis and New York of the 1920s. There’s a constant absence, a definitive Sehnsucht that, no matter how dark or harsh the metal, defines its central themes and gestalt.
But this also opens metal for a central criticism; namely that its reliance on melancholic nostalgia roots it in a constant quest for traditionalism, hooking it to forms of the past. How to innovate if your work is constantly defined by an absence of imagined, often fantastical heritage? And how could a potential modernism within metal look when even its sci-fi-leaning works orient themselves on the nostalgia of, say, the UFO craze during the 1950s or the books of long deceased authors?
The response to this comes in an album that is so incredibly unlike anything in Metal – past or present – that it feels like a tectonic shift. Oranssi Pazuzu‘s Muuntautuja is a monolithic work that deserves the signifier ‘progressive’ without repeating prog-rock tropes, a record that crushes how metal functions by embracing a vast array of esoteric influences. The Finnish quartet has dabbled in atmospheric, psychedelic black metal that incorporated jazz and prog rock for many years now, resulting in a spacey, listenable style that was quite unique in the genre. Norwegian band Ulver is possibly the closest link to a sibling, considering their adventurous exploration of trip hop, electronica and ambient, but that’s not quite communicating how fresh those Oranssi Pazuzu albums felt. Still, Muuntautuja takes leaps in terms of configuring the band’s core aura.
Title track “Muuntautuja” is the perfect example of this. Musically, it has the same ominous, steady groove that can be found on Radiohead’s “Dollars and Cents”, with vocalist Jun-His using a vocoder to generate a robotic effect. There’s also an electronic R’n’B beat running through the song, aided by high pitched electronic notes, that stylistically fit closer to an FKA Twigs song than anything related to metal. When the song finally explodes into full on black metal, it feels more like a logical consequence of accumulated tension than necessary trope – it envisions the genre suddenly entering dance floors.
“Voitelu” continues this sense of grooviness: the inspired jazz drumming, steady bass and roaring guitars somehow morph into body music that becomes inherently physical. The sudden invasion of piano notes adds a strange layer that is familiar from the recent works of Swans, while the vocals manage to centre the track firmly in traditional black metal aesthetics, before the song climaxes in a nasty, distorted blues riff. It’s a breathless, rousing song that unites multitudes of nuanced elements for something genuinely new.
“Hautatuuli” is even more brazen, combining the instrumental qualities of In Rainbows (processed bass, distorted staccato guitar tapestries) with the cleaned up electronic edges and vocal hooks of a SOPHIE track and the loose compositional structure of Can. Opener “Bioalkemisit” uses electronic distortion even more elaborately, fashioning a fast moving cyberpunk rocker that verges into the Industrial palette of Nine Inch Nails. Adapting the eerie choral inserts and atmosphere of 1970s Italian horror film scores, and Reznor-like hammering drum patterns, it conjures eerie visions of neon-drenched, glitching demons: Lovecraft online. There’s little metal that sounds this genuinely futuristic just in its prismatic dynamic and compositional modernism.
And then there’s the record’s most, well, ‘harrowing experience’, the unforgiving “Valotus”. Following a short, cavernous instrumental ambient piece, “Valotus” forms itself from droning nothingness, with ominous drumming and screaming feedback slowly approaching. Reaching the foreground, the black metal tapestry is overlaid with a slow moving, brightly ringing guitar riff that contrasts the sinister, grim onslaught with an almost elysian quality. It’s an oddly beautiful song for a black metal track, also using brick-walling in its production to convey claustrophobia very well – think the dark stone walls of a cave, which remain unmoving to the constant darkness therein. The song slowly progresses and fades out its instruments, as Jun-His rages on, finally only leaving the bass and arpeggiated piano notes. Suddenly, Jun-His screams a couple of lines. And then, without warning, the song explodes into a brutal, ear shattering harsh noise section of brutalist industrial grinding. And, as if to mock the listener, when the noise cuts all out, there’s only a high pitched ringing tinnitus note that remains. And people say there’s no humour in metal.
In its final moments, Muuntautuja takes a majestic twist. “Ikikäärme” opens to a beautiful, Debussy-like piano melody, soon accompanied by hovering bass notes and quiet jazz drumming. Slowly, the track evolves into the soundscape of Blade Runner 2049, with synth lines zapping by, before slowly setting into the mysterious atmosphere of clerical vocal melody and arpeggiated guitars. There’s a cinematic quality to the almost 10 minute track that is inherently narrative: there are shades of aforementioned classic 1970s Italian horror film scores in the guitar line, there’s a haunting, distorted voice (or is it instrument?) that retains the alien qualities of SOPHIE’s “Faceshopping” and finally a grizzly, thundering black metal climax that dives into a drunken guitar riff that communicates deep sadness. And still it moves on, to the haunting atmosphere of a David Lynch film, with robotic voices and a deep organ carrying the track into foreign, surreal territory. It’s hard to really contain the images this song generates, as it’s so conductive of what we assocaite with the individual elements the group combines that, together with its epic length, it becomes inherently suggestive – resembling an attempt to accurately reconstruct the meaning of somebody’s dream.
Instrumental closer “Vierivä usuva” simplifies this process, constructing a brutalist, neon drenched urban cyberpunk landscape. With its immense, wagnerian guitars and 80s synths, it suggests Gotham City, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell. It’s almost adjacent to the dream punk genre and the music of 2814 in how successfully it suggests an imagined futuristic cityscape of gigantic glass and metal skyscrapers. Like the credits to a film, it segues the listener back out, into the real world.
Is Muuntautuja the Kid A of Metal? Can a record this complex and innovative even be subjugated to such a clichéd punchline of forced critical comparison? It does feel like a sudden moment of rejuvenation, of reconstruction, the breaking of walls with the excitement of curiosity. It retains metal’s central atmospheres – the melancholia, the dread, the suggested evil – but lunges itself into krautrock, jazz, hyperpop, progressive rock, noise, ambient, classicism and even R’n’B without ever losing its unique identity.
Where the band’s last album had small elements that accentuated its psychedelic nature, here the group questions how metal is consumed, how bodies respond to it, how it can be mutated, metastasized into a new creature. It doesn’t want to recreate an aesthetic that is subsumed as ‘progressive’, it wants – no, demands – an actual progression. In that, it maybe is similar to Kid A – but also to Blackstar, to Tago Mago and Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.
Can metal be pop? Can it be jazz? Can it become dance music, religious music, cyberpunk? Purists might scoff at these questions and instead lean on traditionalism. But Oranssi Pazuzu have just changed the game. Everything from this point onwards that refers to Muuntautuja is something else, something new: the melancholia of formlessness.
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