Mort au peuple

I tend to enjoy this sort of black metal: simple, riffy, fairly melodic, no excess of pointless ideas or art for art's sake. We don't really 'need' more of it, but who cares, it's still good music. Pogrom plays in a sort of amateurish but intuitive style like a lot of underground French melodic black metal bands do; they only kind of know their way around their instruments, and their understanding of structure mostly comes in the form of riff A -> riff B, repeat as needed, but at least the riffs are good and link together well enough to work both forwards AND back! Brilliant work!

Okay so the cover tells you what to expect: somewhat raw production, mostly guitar-dominated, with an array of melodic, maybe a little depressive-tinged riffs over a mostly unchanging drum presence and some conventional reverbed howling for vocals. This is wholly riff-based music; the music was clearly composed via the guitarist bringing his primitive structure to the rest of the members and everyone else just kind of working around it. It's musically unadorned; there's not a lot in the way of subtle variation or rhythmic play to establish shifting moods or textures, so essentially this music is only as strong as the riffs are.

Fortunately, the riffs are pretty strong! They embody Honor Pugnae's style of working within one's limits and keeping everything constrained to a pretty basic set of chords and just bashing the shit out of them in a few different configurations until a song is done. This all sounds rather unappealing, of course, but the result is simple and consistent music that just about any black metal fan will appreciate. Some of the more outwardly odd elements are fun, especially on the bonus demo tracks which feature drums clearly programmed by a non-drummer, where everything syncs up very directly and in unison. It's simple but it works.

So yeah, there's absolutely no ideas here that haven't been expressed elsewhere, but they're expressed in a manner more consistently interesting than most other black metal, so of course you should give this at least a cursory listen.