Alphaville: Eternally Yours (3LP)

Alphaville's greatest hits from 40 years of band history, completely rearranged and recorded with the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg Alphaville, the biggest German synth-pop export and creator of the legendary 80s anthems "Big in Japan", "Sounds like a Melody" and "Forever Young", dares to take the step into the symphonic. The band reaches for the really big instruments 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 more than a mere translation of the songs into the sound spectrum of a large orchestra. Rather, it is a symbiosis between Marian Gold's unique vocal abilities, the original Alphaville sound and the majestically powerful multifaceted richness of the large German Film Orchestra Babelsberg "Eternally Yours" is about permanence and transience. The lyrics of the songs from four decades are largely written by Gold himself. Dreaming has always been a central theme for Alphaville and Gold: "We get around a lot, 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 song that gives the album its title reads like a lover's farewell letter. "I didn't write a line for the song myself, all the words and all the thoughts come from Shakespeare. I just put them together intertextually and adjusted them minimally to make them more singable for me." "All 23 pieces on the album have become clearer at their core through the editing, they are exposed, unleashed, liberated. Their true nature came out." On this album, Gold, the band's lead singer, and his two arrangers Max Knoth and Christian Lohr succeed in providing the songs' musical content with the appropriate sound content. The songs don't sound unusually bloated or overstretched - on the contrary: as a listener, you wonder about the natural, warm, even familiar sounds and ask yourself why there haven't been more symphonic arrangements of Alphaville songs before. Gold even goes so far as to say: "'Eternally Yours' actually sounds to my ears as if it really was the first Alphaville album - except that it wasn't released forty years ago. We just didn't have an orchestra back then." Alphaville's new studio album "Eternally Yours" is available in a variety of different formats. The album is also available as a Black Vinyl Edition. Three 180g vinyls in lined inner sleeves are packaged in a 300g gatefold. Both vinyl versions contain the entire album plus three bonus tracks and a vinyl-sized insert with lyrics.