Oranssi Pazuzu- Kosmonument (2011)

When creating music some bands blur genre boundaries, and while difficult to pigeonhole, they can still be rather safely said to operate within a particular genre or two. Mitochondrion is a great example of this. There's a lot going on in their songs, but you can rather accurately label them a death/black band. Others completely smash genre boundaries, making simple descriptions of their music impossible. Oranssi Pazuzu is of the latter variety.

If I absolutely had to adhere to the two genre maximum when describing Oranssi Pazuzu, I suppose I would go with something along the lines of "blackened space rock." Which, in and of itself, should sound unique and interesting enough to warrant a download, but that's missing part of the picture. These dudes are obviously big fans of 70's psychedelic and prog rock, the Floyd and Crimson influence comes through loud and clear. I also hear some krautrock, Neurosis and the thundering bass-heavy industrial metal of Godflesh. Droning ambient sections are littered throughout the record. The track "Luhistuva Aikahäkk" starts out with a minimalist groove that almost reminds me of Portishead. "Maavaltimo" breaks out into a driving hardcore riff that nearly gets buried by a host of spacey guitar. "Komeetta" is astonishingly danceable. All of the vocals throughout the album are done in a black metal style and somehow manage not to completely clash with everything else that's going on. Then there are the actual black metal parts. Which, I'm assuming by now you could guess aren't very straightforward. They bend and twist and mutate in a way that reminds me of Deathspell Omega. 

Honestly, I have no idea what the hells this is. It completely defies categorization. I do know that it's one of the most interesting albums I've heard in a long, long time. It's going to take a while to digest, but somehow I know that I'll still be listening to this album years from now.

Oranssi Pazuzu on last.fm

The most "black metal" track on the album.


Might be my favorite song on the album. It's like Godflesh on LSD.


Get it here.

Gigan- Quasi-Hallucinogenic Sonic Landscapes

Surprise! Another death metal gem from 2011!

I hate the overwhelming majority of modern technical death metal. So much of it is just technical for technicality's sake. Bands seem to sacrifice songwriting, heaviness and originality (3 things I value more in my death metal than technicality) for being as tech as they possibly can. I don't get it. Prime example: Revocation. People talk about that band as if they're the second coming of Death. I get that the dude can play guitar and play it quite well, but Revocation's music is some of the most generic, soulless shit I've ever heard. There are a handful bands that pull off technical death metal well, Gorod, Mitochondrion, Gorguts, Decapitated and a few others. I think I can make another addition to that list with Gigan. If you've listened to much tech death then you know what to expect, but here's what I dig about this album: the Gorguts style insane riffing, Gorod-like jazzy bits, inhuman Origin-esque grind tempos (though unlike Origin, Gigan mix up tempos, so their albums aren't an all-out aural assault that gets tedious after a few songs, the quieter sections are also quite nice) and the strange spacey atmospheric stuff. Also, the fact that this album doesn't just sound like a bunch of riffs smashed together.

I've always wished more death metal bands would go for the space/Sci-Fi thing, thanks Gigan.

Gigan on last.fm



Get it here.

Flourishing- The Sum of All Fossils (2011)

This is a tough one. Most of the reviews of Flourishing I have read describe them as a "progressive" or "experimental" death metal band. I feel like "progressive" and "experimental" don't really mean anything anymore, they're terms that get thrown around when it's too difficult to pigeonhole a band's sound and Flourishing's sound is certainly hard to pigeonhole. Death metal certainly applies, but that's only a small part of the story. On The Sum of All Fossils you'll hear death metal, grind, Coalesce-esque weirdness, noise rock and more. I know, it sounds terrible, but trust me. I generally hate genre-salad bands. Too often it ends up sounding like Between The Buried And Me, a bunch of riffs just strung together, but Flourishing somehow make it work. The best description I have read comes from their last.fm page: "The trio bulldozers through massive magnetic riffs, industrial mechanization, realms of dissonance and loose progressive abstraction creating an annihilating rhythmic bedlam." There, does that sound better?

This will most definitely make my top of 2011 list.

Flourishing on last.fm



Get it here.