In the grand scheme of things the genre still may be niche. But if you’re really into Dissonant Cosmic Progressive Avantgarde Black Metal and your day only has the same twenty-four hours like mine, you actually have plenty enough of choice to go through your life without any silent moment. The question is: Why should you specifically chose Exterior Palnet’s Haragma II?
Well, there’s at least one Metal genre I ommited in my boa-constricor description: Thrash. This immediately leads us to two Canadian bands which I confidently assume are huge influences on this Croatian group: Vektor and - the logical next step to their main influence - Voivod. Especially when their apocalyptic rocket relentlessly blasts in full speed while showing off instrumental skills the panicky sensory overload is quite reminscent of a Vektor / Blut Aus Nord hybrid.
So far, so expected? Even though the execution of this sound facette already makes Exterior Palnet worth listening to, the Voivod part is the real spice of this five-track release. Most times when the Sci-Fi Metal legends are referenced in music reviews (and I plead guilty to it, too) it’s in acknowledement of Denis D’Amour’s pivotal role in establishing weird - depending on your taste either disharmonic or jazzy - chords as a part of Extreme Metal’s DNA. But given how much gut feeling is involved in this definition - and taking into consideration how often Voivod’s sound as a band has changed over the years - the “Piggy chord” often is rather a wishy-washy critic’s cop-out than actually helpful in illustrating what’s going on. Not so on Haragma II, where the influence gets refreshingly specific, as Exterior Palnet not only channel the musical havoc of the early phase from Rrröööaaarrr to Killing Technology, but also display a slightly off, unpolished rawness in the vocal performance, which at times gives an energy very similar to the young Denis “Snake” Belanger.
But while the framework of these “V” bands already allows myriads of things to happen, it would be unfair to pigeonhole the group from Zagreb exclusively to these paragons. In the brutal spectrum the aggressively unhinged Blackened Thrash assault also reminds me of Icelandic nihilists Misþyrming or - if we split Black and Thrash Metal - Wiegedood on one and good old Teutones Sodom on the other side. There’s also a groovy, playful Prog element here, which never overshadows the overall spirit of smashing your skull to directly yell into your synapses, but infuses a nice quirky Virus touch into this tornado. If you’re familiar with Exterior Palnet’s 2017 debut Dorsia you will certainly also find remnants of that album’s Post Metal atmosphere here; not so much of any Doom though. And that’s where I stop to let you discover the rest for yourselves, because there are still several little aha moments left, which come out of nowhere, yet immediately fit into the whole experience.
No, if there’s one thing you cannot accuse this band of, it’s not using the thirty-five minutes they’re giving themselves on this release, to the maximum. Maybe they could be more informative about who they are, what concepts lie behind song titles like “Haragma”, “Heracleidae” or “Zaphnat-Paaneah”… On the other hand however oversharing surely can be the enemy of mystery and I admire artists who can still restrain themselves even in our social-media world. **
The music on this killer release remains a banger nonetheless anyway. Following the band’s own example there’s only one way to close this review: Dear Exterior Palnet, you unknown strangers, I salute you.
** Oh, nevermind. Only after I had already finished and scheduled this text for publishing I discovered that the Bandcamp download actually comes with a bunch of behind the scene pictures and even lyrics. So you’re not as mysterious as I thought. But it’s late and I’m not rewriting that whole paragraph now, sorry not sorry.
