A LIFE DIVIDED – The Great Escape [iTunes Edition] (2013)

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As addict to classic rock oriented music, sometimes I need a healthy dose of different sounds to de-intoxicate myself a bit from the melodious waves of our loved musical genres. It’s not an easy task, as modern music in general is a huge pile of garbage, but from time to time some intriguing proposals arise.
Well, it happened to me with Germans A LIFE DIVIDED new album “The Great Escape”, a Bavarian combo making music with a style quite far from our musical tastes, but not less interesting for sure.

I heard the band’s previous album from 2011, and was really suprised when read on many reviews A Life [Divided] tagged as a gothic rock band. Nothing more wrong than this.
These krauts sure know how to bring varying styles together to good effect. A Life Divided do this with great aplomb throughout “The Great Escape”.
It’s a retro-fitted piece of new romantic / synth electro rock driven by sharp staccato guitar riffs, compressed drums, gangland backing vocals and pitched shifted melodic counterpoint choruses, all with a commercial feel.
Often named by some press as a more elaborated version of Linkin Park, if I were a member in A Life Divided I would consider this as an insult.

A Life Divided’s music is absolutely more interesting, solid, well constructed, catchy, even melodic, and if you dig a bit into their essence, you will discover in their musical delivery a band with an arena / stadium style.
Just take as example “Clouds Of Glass”; if you clean a little that synthesized sound masque you obtain a modern melodic rock song. But don’t clean anything, precisely in this ‘electro-rock’ style is where A Life Divided sounds different to the rest, and that’s the point of why I like this band.
On some tracks they remind me the very first NIN when attitude was above of anything, yet their delivery is much more commercial even at parts with a node to Hardcore Superstar’s last album (which I consider truly refreshing in the melodic hard rock field).

A Life Divided attack your ears with harsh tracks like “Game Over”, and then immediately takes you back to ’80s synth pop-rock with “Feel”. You can’t deny the melody and the affected vocal performance here are great.
The band are not a afraid to add some acoustic guitars – although heavily processed – on the dark sounding “Foreign Rain” or shameless (kudos to them) eighties new wave / synthpop dramatic melodic lines in the vein of Australians Real Life in “Wait for Me”, of course with an updated sound.
This iTunes edition includes the exclusive track “Perpetual”, and it’s one of the best, a keyboard-DX-7 driven electro rocker with cool tempo breaks and a retro refrain.

I liked “The Great Escape”, and I liked a lot.
It’s quite different from the classic stuff usually presented here on this blog, truly refreshing, at least for this humble reviewer.
It’s synthetic but at the same time aggressive, melodic but robotic, cheesy but sharp… just different.
And really good.

01 – The Lost
02 – It Ain’t Good
03 – Clouds of Glass
04 – The Last Dance
05 – Game Over
06 – Feel
07 – Perfect Day (feat. Chris Harms)
08 – Foreign Rain
09 – Wait for Me
10 – Goodbye
11 – On the Edge
12 – Space
13 – If You Want To
14 – Perpetual [exclusive iTunes bonus]

Jurgen Plangger – Vocals
Mike Hofstatter – Guitar
Tony Berger – Guitar
Korl Fuhrmann – Drums
Tobi Egger – Bass
Erik Damkohler – Keyboards, Programming, Guitar

BUY IT !
itunes.apple.com/album/great-escape-deluxe-edition/id588400370