Социопат

From the confrontational band name to the jagged logo to the EP title, which translates to "Sociopath", it's immediately clear that Социопат will be intense. The music more than lives up to these expectations, offering four short but fully attention-capturing slabs of raw black metal. The production is lower fidelity than many bands' demos, but this doesn't take a thing away from the music. In fact, the primal savagery of the death metal inspired riffs and ferociously barked vocals is matched by the shoddiness of the recording quality.

There are still some surprises in the production, though, and chief among them is the choice to pan guitars and vocals all the way to the left with the drums all the way to the right. This decision imprints a certain severity to the sound of the EP; it confuses and disorients just enough to call attention to itself, then redirects that attention wherever it needs - a rimshot-laden drum fill here, a particularly unhinged scream there - before the ear retrains itself to accept the dual-fronted onslaught of sound.

The sheer violence of the music is not without its more melodic sections, though. These often come in the form of guitar solos that recall the early thrash-inspired days of black metal while harmonizing with the backdrop of power chords, hinting at something a bit more epic without lapsing fully into an unthreatening melodic sound. By toeing the line between pure blackened death and the more melodic strains of extreme metal, Pogrom manages to make each heavy riff that follows a solo section all the more satisfying.

Социопат's only real failing is that it's a bit too derivative of black metal's earlier days. Though I wouldn't go so far as to call it Deathcrush worship, I wouldn't necessarily blame someone for making that case; at any rate, its blend of influences from old-school death metal and black metal á la Bathory's self-titled is one that I've heard plenty of times before. Of course, that doesn't make it a bad record; even if Социопат was composed with half the originality of similar bands, it was performed with twice the conviction. This alone is enough to earn it some praise, and it should be enough to earn Pogrom some attention.