Exterior Palnet are part of a Croatian scene that, regarding black metal, is beginning to provide interesting signals. Dorsia represents the debut for the band from Zagreb, able to hit the mark with this short but intense work imbued with a cosmic aura, partially indebted to innovators such as Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord, but equally in possession of a personal figure that remains well impressed from the first to the last minute of the work. As always happens, the watershed in albums of this kind is constituted by the degree of intensity that the musicians are able to put in their sound: from the first notes Dorsia portends that the interstellar journey will be perilous but full of satisfaction, sailing without interruption between the seven tracks that make it up. Both in the most reflective moments and when they make the engines run at full speed, Exterior Palnet give the feeling of possessing an innate control of the material and, objectively, a track like II is one of the best things heard in recent times in the black metal field, enhanced by an optimal recording for which the Croatian guys have relied on the recording studios of Brad Boatright in Portland. If we want to be nitpicky, the use of the voice might not find unanimous consensus, which is a kind of recited screamed in the style of Mr. Curse of A Forest Of Stars, but honestly it’s just a detail, within a disc that convinces and surprises more and more after each listening, and it’s really incredible to have to endure the constant whining of those who regret the good old days, when never as in this historical period there have been so many bands able to offer albums of higher level than the average. Dorsia is one of them, given by a band whose origin from a nation with a reduced tradition in extreme metal, paradoxically, favors an approach less bound to well-defined models: to be listened as if it were the soundtrack of a movie set in space, but obviously without the canonical happy ending.

2017 – Independent 2018 – Narcoleptica Productions