Featuring members of Dark Buddha Rising and Oranssi Pazuzu, it’s of course natural that Abyssion should be associated with the current wave of dark psychedelic metal bands coming out of Finland.
However, as their bio accurately points out, there’s also a heavy Burzum and Finnish punk influence.
The songs here are not only built on the same hypnotic repetition utilised by the former, but push the technique to the absolute limit, often providing a strange thrill by maintaining the riffs well beyond their ‘natural’ life. There is certainly a psychedelic overtone exhibited, but it’s generally a complementary rather than dominating feature (a wave of fluctuating noise riding alongside the riffing, for example) and the heart of this beast is predominately formed by relatively straightforward and stripped-down song structures. Add some aggressive and sometimes disturbing bellowed vocals (bizarrely reminiscent of one of Hitler’s Reichstag speeches) and you have a memorable musical cocktail. It actually wouldn’t take much for the whole thing to fail miserably, and yet instead it somehow triumphs in its eccentricity.
