Fairfax singer-songwriter Todd Tate makes his album debut with this ambitious CD featuring his snarling Bowie-as-baritone vocals, a hard rock bass-drums-guitar trio and a wildly incongruous string section.

This is the strangest heavy-metal-meets-classical experiment since Metallica joined the San Francisco Symphony in a collaboration that sometimes sounded like a Stradivarius played with a chain saw.

Life Love Misery's clash of sound and style doesn't end with the instrumentation. Tate writes songs with Elysian titles like “Deer in the Morning,” “Delightful,” “April” and “Beautiful One,” but sings them like in a vocal style that is more misery than life and love.

His rough vocal and his band's dirty fuzz guitars work much better on hard rockers like “Takes the Edge Off,” which argues that pulling a certain woman to your hips is better than cigarettes, beer and cocaine. What's her phone number?

And the opening track, “Sleeping Dogs,” is nice and nasty with its suggestive lyrics about giving the dog a good kick to the curb before throwing it a bone.

Life Love Misery features Tate on guitars and keyboards, drummer Kenny Stravopoulos and bassist Mario Previti of Renegade Studios.

Cellist Heather Houseman and violinists Graham Pellettieri and Vanessa Montgomery, who doubles on viola, make up the ill-advised string section. Montgomery adds a discordant, minor key violin solo on “Sleeping Dogs,” and the video for the song on the band's Web site is an entertaining bit of rock psychedelia in the spirit of Major Lazer's “Pon de Floor” without the dry humping.

Buy It: “Life Love Misery,” Life Love Misery, independent, $11.99, lifelovemisery.com