2 CDs
Alphaville’s greatest hits from 40 years of band history, completely re-arranged and recorded with the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg
Alphaville, Germany’s greatest synth-pop export and creator of the legendary 80s anthems “Big in Japan,” “Sounds like a Melody” and “Forever Young,” ventures into the symphonic. The band reaches for the really big cutlery and catapults the greatest hits from 40 years of band history from the sound of synthesizers and rhythm machines into the world of the human sound machine symphony orchestra. “Eternally Yours” is thereby more than a mere translation of the songs into the sound spectrum of a large orchestra. It is rather a symbiosis between Marian Gold’s unique vocal abilities, the original Alphaville sound and the majestically powerful facet of the large cast German Film Orchestra Babelsberg.
“Eternally Yours” is about permanence and transience. The lyrics of the songs from four decades are for the most part written personally by Gold. A central theme for Alphaville and Gold has always been dreaming: “We get around quite a bit, we’ve played almost everywhere, in and out of our heads. All of that contributes to our music, to the idea of what Alphaville could be. It’s like a never-ending dream. Those who listen to our music hear fragments of that dream.” The titular song reads like a farewell letter from a lover. “I didn’t write a line myself for the song, all the words and all the thoughts are from Shakespeare. I just put them together intertextually and made minimal adjustments to make them more singable for me.”
“All 23 tracks on the album have become clearer at their core through editing, they are exposed, unleashed, liberated. Their true nature came out.” Gold, the band’s lead singer, and his two arrangers, Max Knoth and Christian Lohr, succeed on this album in providing the appropriate sonic content for the songs’ musical content. At the same time, the songs do not sound unusually bloated, not overused – on the contrary: as a listener, one wonders about the natural, warm, even familiar-sounding sounds and asks oneself why there have not been more symphonic arrangements of Alphaville songs before. Gold even goes so far as to say: “‘Eternally Yours’ therefore actually sounds to my ears as if it was in fact the first Alphaville album – only that it wasn’t released forty years ago. We just didn’t have an orchestra on hand back then.”