I was absolutely stunned to notice upon opening the package, staring me straight in the face, there it was, the entire decade of the '80s… and this thing, Alphaville, as synonymous with that once glorious decade as any title you can throw into the winds of yesterday…

Human League or otherwise, and here they are, in the "flesh" so to speak. "Stark Naked & Absolutely Live," which on the surface might not mean much to most who, I'll assume like myself, left this group for dead ages ago.

But with the latest wave of beat pop resurgence from those great names-those fashion crazed addicts that so often graced your TV screen, the circle's not quite complete without those pedal pushing pioneers who for one album alone, presented a song for the ages and "Forever Young," born again-a youth movement revisited at a time when tape machines and hi-tech innovations clash with the obsolete work of the human hand.

Where they've been over the years is not something I'd hazard to guess but apparently Alphaville's stayed very active as their recent deluxe 8-disc, 125 song set-you read right, serves to indicate.

So some sixteen or so years after their first hit album, this underground entity, bred of German origins and led still by Marian Gold, you'll remember him as the singer (and he still looks the same) decide they want to capture the essence of the stage in a mildly overdue recording of their best, their rest and those simply unknown.

It's not like the market's been flooded by live recordings of new wavers doing their thing in the midnight recesses of a dimly lit smoky stage, so the first question for me was, how do all these little blips and beeps and electronic textures come off from the sometime draining resonant surroundings of a crowded theater?

Amazingly enough, each song thus far, and we're three in at this point, sounds like they're performing right there in your living room. In fact they stand out so much more than the noise of the crowd-not that we'll assume Alphaville's audience ranks up there with the rowdiest of the world-you're almost wondering where everyone is until the song ends.

Not unlike a Pink Floyd performance where you can envision the flickering lights highlighting a dark stage and the music, captivating in all its synthesized splendor, has this alluring, "comfortably- numbing" quality-but the people do get up every so often and this, "Stark Naked…," symbolic in for Alphaville, an unprecedented feat, is thirteen songs of pure pop afterglow.

Beginning with the inviting "Sounds Like a Melody," the sultry "Cosmopolitician," the anxious "A Victory of Love" and of course the closing moments "Big in Japan," where of course they must still be, and "Forever Young," the show stopper which doesn't actually end there but rather this massive rendition of the very spacious "Apollo," and some unknown, unlisted bonus track-which I haven't found yet.

So this throwback live recording is an ironic turn toward the future for Alphaville, "Forever Young" over and again-a first for them, a touring band since '96, and a definite statement for them and others like them-do we hear the familiar flutter of A.F.O.S. somewhere in the distance-now, later and anywhere the desire still burns in the heart of the young...

Released in Europe by SPV
Distibuted by SPV GmbH, P.O. Box 72 1147, 30531 Hannover, Germany
Website : http://www.spv.de

Review by Vinnie Apicella [va85@columbia.edu]