The band has done itself credit simply by not embarrassing itself, delivering a listenable deck of plush, lacy ballads.
The band has done itself credit simply by not embarrassing itself, delivering a listenable deck of plush, lacy ballads.
C ongratulations to ABBA, which has just released its highest-charting album ever in the U.S.: Last month, Voyage debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart. No, ABBA still hasn’t had a No. 1 album in this country. Keep trying folks, and maybe you’ll be as big as Harry Styles someday.
I prefer to look on the bright side with Voyage: It isn’t great, but it’s not bad. Yes, I am grading on a curve. There’s one kind-of-okay dance number, “Don’t Shut Me Down,” featuring a piano glissando like the one that kicks off “Dancing Queen,” and a few stately orchestral songs, notably the closer, “Ode to Freedom.” Some of the album is filler.
What did you expect? In the entire history of music, few composers past 70 have managed to accomplish much of note, and Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus are 74 and 76, respectively. They have done themselves credit simply by not embarrassing themselves, delivering a listenable deck of plush, lacy ballads. The world’s only useful music critic, Rod Liddle, calls the album a “bit of a dog” but I think he’s being quippy here, since there’s a song about a dog named Tammy (“I Can Be That Woman”) and it typifies the album’s gentle, reflective, heartfelt mood. (Also, Liddle listened to the album only twice. C’mon, man.)
Liddle is correct in noticing that Andersson and Ulvaeus can’t deliver the spectacular hooks anymore, so they move like active seniors: carefully, with determination, passing from one pretty chord to another without ever grabbing the attention, and putting on layers of typically glossy production to disguise the frail bones beneath. The mood is a sort of insistent majesty, as though the tracks aspire to be played at the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.
None of the ballads can hold a candle to “Eagle” or “I Wonder.” But Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad still sing beautifully. “I Still Have Faith in You,” an opening number that builds from synthesizer to piano to a bombastic climax like the ones in mid ’80s power ballads by Heart, is a reasonably effective effort, and “When You Danced With Me,” driven by a startlingly uncharacteristic sound of marching drums and bagpipes, is at least a worthwhile attempt at a rousing folk anthem.
“Little Things,” about the pleasures of opening a stocking on Christmas, has a sweet, childlike earnestness that taps into how the very young and the very old often share an appealing naivety and openness.
That song shimmers with gratitude and endurance, suggesting a refreshing point of view for a pop album: the stability of post-youth. Building art out of contentment (as opposed to rage, lust, joy, despair, etc.) is nearly impossible, but Benny and Bjorn just about manage. Mostly, the album is intended to build excitement for the hologram concerts ABBA plans to stage next year, which promise to be dazzling.
Just having an okay new album from the quartet is a pop-culture sensation: The Visitors, their previous record, arrived 40 years ago. By comparison, the second-most-remarkable regrouping in pop/rock history, the Eagles’s Hell Freezes Over album and tour in 1994, arrived a mere eyeblink after that band’s breakup 14 years earlier. Death made it impossible for the Beatles or Led Zeppelin to reunite, and though Pink Floyd did perform a concert in 2005, 20 years after its co-leader Roger Waters left, the full act never did deliver new material following its sad swan song, the lashed-together Final Cut album of 1983.
Voyage also serves as a much-deserved chance for Ulvaeus and Andersson to take a long bow before the world. (They’ve been publicizing the album while the women demur. None of them want to tour.) Dismissed by too many at their peak, then reviled in the 1980s, ABBA began to reclaim its place in the pop pantheon in 1992, with the release of the ABBA Gold greatest-hits album (displacing two previous collections that each covered half of their career). In 1994, the surprise hit Australian movie Muriel’s Wedding, about an unapologetically ABBA-loving bride played by Toni Collette, made it safe for ABBA lovers to acknowledge that, say, “Dancing Queen” is one of the greatest pop songs of its era. Then came the world domination of the most successful jukebox musical ever: Mamma Mia hit London in 1999 (and is still going), Broadway in 2001 (ninth-longest run in history), and the screen in 2008 ($600 million gross despite Pierce Brosnan’s strangled-moose singing). The 2018 movie sequel earned $400 million and built to one of the great reveals in musical-cinema history: “Fernando” is Andy Garcia.
The extensive, grueling period of ABBA shame is now long past, and two more generations of fans have materialized to re-establish the group as a world-beloved institution. The hologram show (debuting in London in the spring) will idealize the band, showing them at their Seventies peak, via more advanced technology than has previously been used on these productions. Bring it on, and thank you for the music.