KNOW YOUR ALPHAVILLE

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Almost to the day, four decades after the band was founded in 1982 and 38 years after the 1984 release of their debut ‘Forever Young’Alphaville are back with ‘Eternally Yours’ an album of orchestral arrangements of their greatest hits, including of course their UK Top Ten ‘Big In Japan’, and a number of songs hitherto released only as part of Alphaville‘s ‘Dreamscapes’ project. ‘Eternally Yours’ is released 23 September 2022 by Neue Meister (Edel).
 
‘Eternally Yours’ is a true surprise: a fully symphonic album from Alphaville. Additionally, Marian Gold and his two arrangers, Max Knoth and Christian Lohr, have succeeded in tweaking the human sound machine that is the orchestra so as to produce a range of nuances and expressive resources that defies comparison with other attempts by rock bands to work with symphonics. The title track is a brand new composition for this album and has lyrics drawn exclusively from Shakespearean sonnets.
 
Marian Gold“It was clear to me from the start that Alphaville music is not of the present day, not of our world. I have always sought to paraphrase it, saying: Our songs are like dreams, our music is dream music. It’s no accident that the first piece on the new album is entitled ‘Dream Machine’.”
 
 “All 23 numbers on this album have been essentially clarified by their arrangement, they’re stripped clean, released, set free. Their true nature has been revealed. So ‘Eternally Yours’ really does sound to me as if it were actually the first Alphaville album – except that for forty years, it lay unreleased. We simply didn’t have access to an orchestra in those days, we ‘only’ had synthesizers and rhythm machines.”
 
If the newly arranged songs now recorded with the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg fit so readily into a present day when the times are out of joint, that is due in no small measure to Marian Gold‘s still highly impressive countertenor.
 
‘Eternally Yours’ never for a moment sounds laboured, the music flows. The story of Alphaville floats by in 23 songs, as the years melt away. The symphonic arrangement has had a transcendent effect on the songs.
 
“On ‘Eternally Yours’ I was sometimes singing with the last of my strength. I confess that as a singer, I’m starting to feel my age. Vocally, I have put into this album everything I had to give.”
 
To understand ‘Eternally Yours’, we must submit to the truth of dreams. We hear songs we have known all our lives in arrangements that are simultaneously majestic, elegiac and melancholic. The everlasting and conflicting themes of both endurance and evanescence inform this album, and we hear them on ‘Eternally Yours’ in all 23 symphonically charged numbers.
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