Morphosis

Hate is one of the more prominent Polish black/death metal bands along with Behemoth and Vesania. Behemoth is obviously the best known of these bands and rightfully so. Since they've lost their pure black metal influences, Behemoth has turned into a more refined and brutal death metal band. Hate, on the other hand, is pretty much a reverse process of this. They started out as a more American style death metal band (Deicide, Morbid Angel, etc.) that slowly began to bring more black metal influences into their music.

I will admit, the first time I heard this album I wasn't very impressed. I thought that this was just another random Behemoth rip-off that didn't bother with the concept of originality. Of course when I had first listened to this I was hardly paying much attention to the actual music and was too busy bashing them for being similar to Behemoth. I later revisited this album, only to realize what I was missing out on and how much I was wrong earlier in my opinion.

The production on this album is fantastic, at least for a blackened death metal album. It isn't too crystal clear that it sounds like Dimmu Borgir nor is it distorted to fuck all like Consume the Forsaken. The drums are a bit dodgy but overall the sound is pretty good. The guitar tone is great; it has that black metal treble in it but it also has the low crunch of death metal as well. The bass is partially audible, like a black metal album, but it isn't really that much of a problem seeing as how this album is mostly guitar driven.

Adam the First Sinner's vocals are pretty damn powerful this time around. On Erebos I think he took some influence from Nergal and went for more of a diaphragm shouting growl, and I think that took away from the brutality of his original style. His growl here is more of a Glen Benton throaty bellow, and, because of it, the lyrical delivery is more profound here. His vocal performance isn't as good here as it was on Anaclasis, but it definitely holds up.

The riffing here is very black metal influenced, as I've stated before, and it is definitely better written this time around than their older albums. Their older black-influenced stuff was a bit shaky in its songwriting and, for lack of a better term, not comfortable in its own skin. Songs like Threnody are dripping with black metal tremolo melodies and incredible black metal blasting, whereas other songs like Omega are more melodic black metal tinged. Basically what we're hearing here is black metal being played on downtuned guitars with deep growling.

I'd definitely check this album out if you're a fan of the Polish metal scene, because I believe that these guys are very underrated. Behemoth is starting to reclaim their former glory, but until then, why not embrace these guys who are just as good?

The sad reality about the live metal scene these days is that, odds are that for every good opening band there will be about 3 or 4 shitty ones which make almost everyone present suffer. As a case in point, the last tour I’ve seen had 3 utterly disappointing opening bands and a single competent one. However, the upside to it all is that discovering a great band this way is extremely satisfying. In this case, we’re talking about Hate, a Polish death metal band whose talent is very impressive.

Hate are a band who play modern-sounding death metal with a black metal aesthetic, including corpsepaint and long, dark dress-like stage gear. That description should bring what is perhaps the most common image of Polish metal in everyone’s minds: Behemoth. For a while, I scoffed at Hate and almost dismissed them as a second-tier Behemoth rip-off band. But a closer analysis of their music reveals it to be much more than that: these guys may play modern-sounding death metal, but it’s not at all as stagnant and increasingly stale as is the stuff Behemoth’s been doing ever since the solid Demigod.

Hate’s most recent album, Morphosis, is a huge chunk of mid-paced death metal with real atmosphere and talent at work. The guitars are exactly half of the important instrumentation here: they provide solid, classic death metal riffs endlessly, and both Adam the First Sinner and Destroyer (the two guitarists) are capable of playing their instrument to very high levels, as they sometimes show with some remarkable solos. One of the most noticeable of these is near the very end of the album, during the last half of the last song, Eraser.

The second half of the album’s sound base is also the element which impressed me most during the live concert that convinced me that these guys were the real deal: the drumming. Hexen is a relatively small, corpsepaint-clad man, but damn can he fucking punish his drum kit. His talent mainly lays in providing the music with an extremely constant pummelling sound that makes it some of the most headbangable death metal around. Sure the double bass is used a lot, but his overall variation is excellent and his technicality is supremely impressive. If I’d have to name one member who defines the Hate sound best, it’d definitely be Hexen due to all his skills. This man owes me for the sharp pain in my neck.

From a vocal point of view, Hate is a rather ordinary band. Adam the First Sinner does some very good growls, but they remain largely the same all along and one can almost call them monotonous due to the considerable lack of variation, as well as the lack of originality. That said, they work relatively well as an accompaniment to the instrumental side of the music, by far the most important anyway, so the lack of originality or variation isn’t really that much of a fault.

Hate’s music mainly deals with themes related to religion and how to best criticize it. Biblical references aren’t uncommon and the whole album concept isn’t that far off from what one could expect to encounter in your average death/black metal hybrid. The last distinct element worth mentioning is the production, which is just right. It sounds very clean, allowing everything to be heard all right and the elements to be well balanced, while perhaps sacrificing a bit of the thick atmosphere that your favorite old-school album might have.

In any case, Hate’s Morphosis is a very solid death metal album. It won’t revolutionize the genre or become an essential in everyone’s minds, but it’s a damn fine piece of work from a very dedicated and talented band, and is worth giving a fair shot.