Band:	Hate
Album:	Morphosis
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	April 2008

01. Metamorphosis
02. Threnody
03. Immum Coeli (Everlasting World)
04. Catharsis
05. Resurrection Machine
06. The Evangelistic Pain
07. Omega
08. Erased

Although Hate's Morphosis is far from being an embarrassing release, it is nevertheless a case of the band being "the little engine that couldn't". As much as their enthusiasm at expanding their musical palette should be commended, the result just isn't powerful enough to challenge the big dogs of cold, mechanical extreme music - Zyklon and Red Harvest, or even recent Satyricon...

Morphosis follows the lead of the Polish outfit's previous release Anaclasis: A Haunting Gospel Of Malice & Hatred by embedding their straight-forwardly brutal death metal approach with samples and a consciously mechanical and soulless sound. The idea, besides mixing things up a little bit, is obviously to concoct a mixture that is meant to frighten the hell out of the listener. The band falls short on both these aims. Although the music on Morphosis is indeed not your run of the mill death metal, passages that do nothing more than pummel away at (impressive) speed still dominate this release and the production is simply not adequate enough at summoning the kind of nightmarish industrial hell that they could. The ubiquitous lack of a low end in production is probably most to blame for this. Morphosis sounds very thin, with an audible but unimpressive bass, squeaky guitar textures and overly clipped drums. A harsher, more powerful aural atmosphere (think Zyklon or Hate's neighbors Behemoth) would do wonders for this album and should be something the band invests in next time around. Song-structure wise, the tracks on this album are actually often fairly impressive - particularly the last three songs on Morphosis are a pleasure to listen to. If the previous songs were less focused on hyper speed blasting and the whole album was given better production, my impression of it would benefit exponentially.

As it is, right now Hate sounds like a small engine attempting to overtake the beastly machinery that powers other bands in this special race. Give the Polish deathmongers some more horsepower and we'll see how well they do next time.