Alphaville - Eternally Yours (2 CD Edition)
ALPHAVILLE'S GREATEST HITS FROM 40 YEARS OF BAND HISTORY, COMPLETELY RE-ARRANGED AND RECORDED WITH THE GERMAN FILM ORCHESTRA BABELSBERG
The double CD
Alphaville, the greatest German 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 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 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 by Gold himself. 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 pieces on the album have become clearer at their core through the editing, they have been exposed, unleashed, liberated. Their true nature came out." Gold, lead singer of the band, and his two arrangers Max Knoth and Christian Lohr succeed on this album in providing the appropriate sound content for the musical content of the songs. The songs don't sound unusually bloated or overused - 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' 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 to hand at the time."
Disc 1
1 Dream machine
2 Summer in Berlin
3 Big in Japan
4 Dance with me
5 Summer rain
6 Apollo
7 Elegy
8 Lassie come home
9 Moongirl
10 Welcome to the sun
Disc 2
1 A victory of love
2 Sounds like a melody
3 Around the universe
4 Eternally yours
5 Diamonds are forever
6 Flame
7 Forever young
8 Big in Japan (Bassroque Version)
9 Sounds like a melody (Chamber Version)
10 Forever young ("Petite")
11 Big in Japan (Single Edit)
12 Sounds like a melody (Single Edit)
13 Forever young (Single Edit)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free Version)