ALIA TEMPORA – “Digital cube”
Digital Cube
The album is not only a good one musically, but also offers a lot of food for your brain. Think about what you do with modern media!
The album starts with a time travel.
Wow, that’s a cool start! ALIA TEMPORA didn’t exactly create a concept album, but there is a theme present all the time: digitization. The opener – ‘Connected’ – is the sound of an old modem connecting to the internet followed by song snippets. Feels like being abashed into the late 90s/early 2000s. The title track also adresses this topic: the song is about the generation of digital natives who’s online all the time, unable to keep friends with offliner or to realize beauty in their real sorroundings. It’s a lot of critique in that song & the whole album.
Musically, “Digital Cube” is a mixture of gothic metal with a lot of electronic passages & several other influences which mellow the album. Vocalist Markéta Morávková is a mezzo-soprano; although so there aren’t dizzy highs, ALIA TEMPORA take the footsteps of traditional gothic metal bands with the mixture of a light female voice and growls by Stepan Reznícek. The melodies are catchy & the lyrics are intelligent without missing a small sense of humour – just think about smartphone zombies.
The band obviously likes Hunger Games movies.
The next highlight after the title track is ‘Mockingjay’, a song dedicated to the books & movies ‘Tributes of Panem’. There are a lot of hints in the lyrics & also in the music video which you can watch below. I couldn’t get the song out of my head for days! Especially the electronic parts pop up not only this but every song on “Digital Cube” without being too much. ALIA TEMPORA’s music is very powerful & has a groove in it which I kind of miss in recent albums of well-known bands in this genre.
This is also something one could criticize: You can hear that ALIA TEMPORA is a young band – I conceive this positive, because the sound is fresh & refreshingly naive in parts. Blame it to this fact that the production is not 100% clean – especially high tunes sound a bit dirty, but that’s okay. You only recognize those little mistakes in the ballads – ‘Far & forgotten’ is beautiful, ‘Now & then (Bitrate)’ shows what a metal ballad can be with a healthy amount of synthesizer effects.
Critizism towards our media generation.
‘Disconnected’ again reffers to the subject of digitization – it’s a song about a person who set himself free from social media & discovers the real world, feeling rain on his skin & is awake of all the secrets hidden in the real world. In addition, ALIA TEMPORA put a remix of ‘Mockingjay’ by Timo Somers on the album, which for me is a bit too electronical – dubstep included. But, hey, it’s a remix. If you don’t like it, listen to the original song. At least, the guitar solo comes out pretty good in this one. Another gift is a piano version of ‘FairyTale’ without vocals. Just beautiful!
To sum it up, “Digital Cube” is a really good debut album. ALIA TEMPORA didn’t just release an album but thought about a topic, realized it with good ideas & put some little extras on the album. The band from Czech Republic created a diversified album & listening to it doesn’t get boring for days. So if you didn’t support them in their crowdfunding campaign, check out the music video below & support the band if you like it. They deserve!
Tracklist:
01. Connected
02. Digital Cube
03. Frozen
04. Far & forgotten
05. Mockingjay
06. Aurora
07. Leave you behind
08. Now & then (Bitrate)
09. FairyTale
10. Disconnected
11. Mockingjay (Remix)
12. FairyTale (Piano version)