ABBA takes a real chance: ABBA:The Album – (Atlantic SD 19164)
By John Rockwell - Rolling Stone (Australian Edition) 23 March 1978
Since their 1974 Eurovision Song Contest victory with
Waterloo, ABBA has laid convincing claim to being the world’s
largest-selling pop group. Certainly, it’s a claim taken seriously outside the
United States, but, in this country, the band hasn’t done nearly as well.
They’ve topped the singles charts only once with
Dancing Queen and have
never broken through at the money-making LP level.
ABBA’s songs have always been a calculated blend of six elements: innocently
superficial lyrics, bouncy Euro-pop music, rock energy and amplification,
soaring melodies, Mamas and Papas high female harmonies and lavish sonic
textures. That said, The Album
represents an interesting departure from past formulas and will undoubtedly
receive a mixed response. There are several songs on it – mostly on the first
side – that are cast in the traditional mold and that are as fine as anything
the group has heretofore recorded. But side two is a real attempt to do
something different, and, if not everything on it works, the effort is still
laudable.
Those of us who love ABBA do so because the band is about as pure an example of
smart/dumb pop imaginable. Significant rock is all well and good, but there is
always a place for pop music that is fun. Most of ABBA’s past hits have been
unadulterated pop, with lyrics – written in English by Swedes who’ve always had
a slightly quaint conception of English syntax and pronunciation – that operate
at the most basic level of childish/adolescent fantasy.
But what really counts with ABBA is the music, and here the group shows genuine
originality. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad may not have particularly
striking voices, but both are cute and personable performers vocally and
visually, and together they generate a sound that should warm the heart of any
fan of The Mamas And The Papas or Phil Spector. However the real talent in ABBA
is clearly that of the two composer/producers, Benny Andersson and Björn
Ulvaeus, who also play keyboards and guitar, respectively. Also, the work of
Stig Anderson, the group’s manager and co-lyricist, and Michael B. Tretow, the
engineer, cannot be overlooked. Together, these men and women create the
characteristic ABBA sound, in which those almost invariably irresistible
melodies and hooks are enriched with a sensuousness of instrumental and vocal
color that may be unmatched for invention and consistency in the history of pop
music.
That richness is richer than ever with this new record, and all four songs on
side one benefit mightily from it. There is perhaps a slightly greater effort
made with the lyrics than in the past, but essentially these are songs worthy of
instant inclusion on any forthcoming greatest-hits LP. (For ABBA neophytes, by
far the best introduction to this quintessential singles band is
Greatest
Hits, even if most of the hits weren’t hits in America. Anyone who
could listen to this record five times and not wind up humming half the songs is
an android.)
Side two begins with a prophetically titled song called
Move On, which blends a superb chorous with a text that poses the
need for innovation and change like some pop Heraclitus.
Move On is followed by
The Album’s one overt failure, a stiff
attempt at rock & roll called Hole In Your
Soul. ABBA may have toughened its Euro-pop with rock energy in the past, but
real, blues-based rock music is far from the group’s sensibility, and this
sounds both clinical and awkward.
But the last three songs – three scenes from a “mini-musical,
The Girl With The Golden Hair – are far more provocative. The lyrics
trace the saga of the heroine (presumably Fältskog, though both women have
appeared onstage in blonde wigs) from introspection on what a nebbish she really
is, to gratitude for the music that has justified her life, to reflection on
what things might have been like without fame, to a renewal of ambition and an
almost demonic bitterness about how her career has turned her into a mere
puppet. The words make clever use of some of the idioms and phraseology of
old-time Broadway musicals, and especially in the finale,
I’m A Marionette – seem surprisingly self-revelatory, given ABBA’s
past impersonality. The music, too, stretches out to include elements of cabaret
and musicals, and, in I’m A Marionette,
attains a dark frenzy that deepens ABBA’s image without distorting it.
ABBA has taken a real chance with this LP. The group had a formula which, if it
hadn’t yet quite caught hold in America, still sold millions of records
worldwide. Now, by hinting at things beneath the bright surface of that formula,
the band has opened itself up to criticism for not having been profound all
along. But, with The Album, ABBA makes
it all work, and one hopes that record buyers in this country will respond to
the quality and originality of the music presented here.
