Here is a great band that is highly recommended for anyone else out there who is sick of the glut of generic bands who all sound the same and who want to hear something that is a little bit different to the norm without resorting to those Avant-garde bands who concentrate so much on being experimental that they forget to make their music enjoyable to listen to. Not only are The Project Hate MCMXCIX one of the few bands out there who can be said to be truly unique, they are also a band who would stand out from the crowd no matter how many imitators ever attempted to steal their sound.

To give a brief description of their sound: they combine Death Metal and Techno/Industrial keyboard sounds with a mixture of extreme male "Death Metal" style vocals and clean female vocals. Do not let this make you confuse them with the legions of Gothic Metal bands out there who use the same Beauty and Beast combination when it comes to vocals, as The Project Hate really don't sound much like those bands at all, and not just because they are, as I said earlier, truly unique but also because they are on a completely different and usually more extreme and uncompromising wavelength to those bands. You really have to listen to them to see what I mean.

Some skeptics out there may think that Death Metal, Techno and female vocals would be such unhappy bedfellows as to be impossible to make work together. Well, The Project Hate are the band to prove them wrong as the diverse musical elements that they employ combine to create an ever-evolving apocalyptic musical soundscape that is every bit as cohesive as it is breathtaking. A Death Metal part evolving into a mellow electronic part and then back again sounds like the most natural thing in the world in their hands.

The quality of both the male and the female vocals is extremely high, with the male vocals being beastly to the extreme and the female vocals being both powerful and melodic but without the wannabe soprano tendencies that many female singers in Metal often resort to. Mia Ståhl provided the female vocals for the first 2 albums and for the live album “Killing Helsinki”, and by Jonna Enckell for both of the albums after that. Both are extremely good singers with Jo being my personal preference, particularly with her performance on the most recent Project Hate album “Armageddon March Eternal (Symphonies of slit wrists)” where she enlisted the help of a vocal coach. Some other people do prefer Mia though so you will have to listen to both to decide for yourself who you like best.

Further testimony to the quality of the vocals is that the lyrics are very easy to make out for both the male and female vocals - they certainly don't suffer from the Unintelligible Lyrics Syndrome that is common in Death Metal. Christianity is their favourite subject when it comes to lyrics, and to say that they do not appear to be fans of Jesus is a bit of an understatement, nor do they mince their words - all of which drip with pure venom and hatred for the subject at hand. Any Christians who find this off-putting can be reassured that while the band members apparently do have a genuine dislike for Christianity, they save their anti-theism for the music and are not to be confused with the members of bands such as Dissection in real life.

A word of warning to those of you who are of a sensitive disposition or who like your music to be nice: despite the sense of melody that their keyboards and female vocals often give to their music The Project Hate really do live up to their name and their music succeeds in creating a willfully malevolent atmosphere even during their more melodic sections. This certainly helps give the different elements in their music such a strong sense of cohesion.

Another reason why The Project Hate manage to make it all work so well is that their mixture of sounds comes from a genuine musical open-mindedness and is never experimentation for experimentation's sake. As well as being a Death Metal fan, founder member and main creative force Lord K Philipson also loves Techno music and has a passion for female vocal artists. That he would combine all of these disparate musical elements that he loved in one band was only natural. To satisfy his pure Death Metal side he combines The Project Hate with also being a full-time member of God Among Insects (http://tph.statikmajik.com/gai/index.php).

It also helps that Lord K has an undeniable flair for writing heavy riffs that have a groove and catchiness that few others achieve plus an ability to arrange his compositions for maximum effect, all combined with a passion for excellence and unwillingness to compromise that ensures that nothing ever makes it's way onto a Project Hate album that he doesn't personally regard as being totally perfect in every way.

One example of Lord K's unwillingness to compromise on quality is the story of his first attempt to create the Project Hate sound. He formed a band called Deadmarch who recorded their first album “Initiation of Blasphemy” in 1998 but was unhappy with the end result, particularly with the male vocals and with the lack of professionalism of the other members of the band and rather than compromise and let an inferior version of his vision be released he dissolved the band and would not release the album. He kept female singer Mia Ståhl who's performance he was happy with and resolved to do it all again, but this time to do it properly. The end result of this was The Project Hate MCMXCIX.

There was a plan which was scuppered by the Recording Studio losing the tapes to re-record the male vocals on the Deadmarch album with Project Hate vocalist Jörgen Sandström and release the album officially in 2005, so instead, the band have made the original recordings available for download from their website as a gift to their fans. At the time of writing these downloads were still available from the band's forum, but the website does state that this will be for a limited time only. It still is a great album and is certainly worth hearing even if Lord K would later go on to do it all even better with The Project Hate.

The 4 official albums that they have released are all of an extremely high calibre. If you are new to the band and want to know which is the best to get first then I would recommend that you start with their newest album “Armageddon March Eternal (Symphonies of slit wrists)” and work backwards from there since they are a band who have tended to further perfect their sound and style with each subsequent release. There is also the fact that it will probably be easier to find their later albums to the first 2, both of which suffered from poor distribution.