- Nostalgia is a commodity that all entertainment media survives and thrives on, without it nothing would have longevity and as we age we wouldn’t consume anything beyond sustenance, food and drink, perhaps clothing and toiletries. What a dispiriting and dire existence that would be. Musicians, singers, managers and record labels know the all-encompassing power of nostalgia: how many versions of Blue Moon have there been, since it was written in 1934, or Lennon/McCartney’s Yesterday born in 1965 and still going with over sixteen-hundred different cover versions, the most recorded song in history. Nostalgia is smart business, though it goes hand-in-karma-like-hand with embarrassment and pity if it’s not done honestly and with some understanding of the meaning behind it.
Forty years have passed since Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson & Anni-frid Lyngstad – known to the entire world as ABBA released a full-length album. Since then only five completed songs and a few snippets and parts of demos have ever been officially released. Now in a world that could not be more different than their mid-late ‘70’s heyday they present a “traditional” ten song album, just as they did nearly every year from 1973 to 1981. Voyage, it’s fair to say, is probably the most anticipated album since… well… since “ever”. Like JJ Abrams helming the re-launch of the Star Wars saga in 2015 with The Force Awakens that much expectation is bound to produce areas of falling short and even disappointment and depending on your point of view, the overall result rides over those slightly sour moments leaving the viewer (or listener) on balance, mightily satisfied.
Voyage is ABBA – but not quite as you would remember them. In fact, most Australians probably have them fixed like a prehistoric insect in amber somewhere around 1975-1977 with their domination of Australian radio, television and record sales charts. It would be wise to let that image go, because ABBA advanced well beyond the Mamma Mia, When I Kissed The Teacher, Knowing Me, Knowing You style with each subsequent album released after their one and only Australian live-in-concert tour of March 1977. Given their last album The Visitors explored themes of the Cold War, militarism, losing connection with a child rapidly growing up, an older couple break up, sadness on one side of such a break-up and an eyebrow raising ménage-a-trois – just where could Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA’s principal lyricist, go in 2021?
It’s not hard to hear that he and Benny Andersson have spent a decent part of the last forty years writing songs for musicals – their English language collaboration with Sir Tim Rice (Chess) and a project close to so many Swede’s hearts, their own adaptation of Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants novels about the great Swedish Nineteenth Century migration to the USA, under the Swedish title “Kristina från Duvemåla”. Voyage opens with I Still Have Faith In You, the track released to the world at the start of September heralding their return (and announcement of a cutting-edge “live” immersive concert in a purpose built arena at the 2012 Olympic Park in London, featuring a combination of live musicians and the so-called “ABBAtars”, digital recreations of the four Swedes circa 1977 (courtesy of another ‘70’s icon’s invention – George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic that created the Star Wars universe, among other things). It is suitably epic in scope, starting with a gentle, cooing vocal from Anni-frid Lyngstad, her voice still sounding like warm velvet wrapping a liquid dark chocolate, flowing through the listener’s ears. As a statement of purpose, it certainly does that. The steepling chorus shows that even though both women are into their seventies, apart from a natural darkening of some of the timbre, there is little missing from the last time they recorded together.
The album might start with a grand epic but it then dives headfirst into something so much fun that you can’t help but think “This is ABBA?” When You Danced With Me has a rollicking folk music flavour – to Australian ears, Irish (and the song name checks “Kilkenny”) but Swedish folk music isn’t that dissimilar to the Celtic folk tradition – one that Andersson was born into and relishes in reviving at every chance he gets. It’s just a damn fun song – but – with that “Nordic noir” flavour in the lyrics just to keep you on your toes; but you wish that they’d go around one more time with the chorus as at two minutes and fifty seconds it’s just way too short.
Little Things would be a painfully twee song sung by anyone but Anni-frid & Agnetha, and again Ulvaeus’s lyrics take you in one direction, then twist ever so slightly. It’s a twinkling Christmas song that emphasises family and seeing Christmas through a child’s eyes. It might come as a surprise to realise that of the two lead singers, Voyage shows just how vital Agnetha’s ability to “sing with a cry in her voice” is to the success of the band, and given she has only released two albums in the last seventeen years, how she sounds as if she hasn’t been off grandmother-ing is truly remarkable. Each track she takes a lead vocal on raises it above what it could have been in a less accomplished popular singer – the second single from the album Don’t Shut Me Down is storytelling like you no longer expect in pop song, but here it is and it is a song that is like a mini- ABBA greatest hits in one, the chugging rhythm of Take A Chance On Me or One Of Us, the piano glissando of Dancing Queen and the earnest vocals of The Winner Takes It All; it’s a stand out.
Just A Notion is a strange beast – the only track on the album where the vocals are over forty years old. Originally recorded in 1978 for what would be the disco influenced album Voulez Vous but never “finished”, now it has a thumping boogie-woogie piano led instrumental and like When You Danced With Me it’s just a silly, fun song which lyrically might be better staying in the less “correct” 1970s than the more aware 2020s. The middle to last third of the album offers four songs, each different from the other – two with Agnetha’s vocals leading and two with Anni-frid. I Can Be That Woman is pure country, but not actually sounding like a country standard, lyrically it is superior to many country tracks as well (just how much Ulvaeus can mine out of relationships on the rocks is equally impressive, it must be a Swedish thing….) A Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette could take this and make it their own but neither could sound as fragile as Agnetha does here. Moving swiftly on to Keep An Eye On Dan (no, not a song the anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown freedom nutters in Victoria have concocted about Dan Andrews) but a song that also explores a marriage breakup, this time involving a small boy, Dan, who is the focus of shared custody (and you thought ABBA just sang facile lyrics…). The synth-edge track resonates with the dark tones on The Visitors and once again Agnetha’s vocals are from somewhere else.
Anni-frid’s final two lead vocal songs are as different as Fernando and When All Is Said and Done. Bumblebee is a massive environmental plea, something Anni-frid has been working at for the last thirty years, but it is shaped like that fourteen-weeks-at-number-one-in Australia track, with flutes twittering all over the place, another ABBA hallmark – finding just the right way to bring orchestral instruments into the mix. No Doubt About It sounds as if it could have featured on one of Anni-frid’s two English language solo albums from the early ‘80s – it’s got a punky-rocky drive to it and the attack Anni-frid puts into delivering the lyric belies the fact that she is just over the three-quarters of a century mark. The final track is probably a bit pompous – and yet – the lyrics say that, it is difficult to write a song called Ode To Freedom without it sounding over-stuffed with good intentions. All four members sing both unison and harmony and like No Doubt About It, musically it’s not straightforward and yet another example of those unexpected twists Andersson and Ulvaeus put into the final mix.
To be blunt, if you hated ABBA in the ‘70s and ‘80s and didn’t mellow with the “Priscilla/Muriel’s Wedding/Mamma Mia” led recovery in ABBA’s reputation over the last thirty years, then Voyage is hardly going to change your opinion. It’s said that the music you were listening to at thirteen is the music that shapes your life and it is what you return to over and over as long as you live. In these reviews I write, I usually keep to the third person – however – here I will break that rule. I was one of the thirteen-year-olds entranced by Ian “Molly” Meldrum’s playing of Mamma Mia on Countdown in August 1975. I am still entranced by these four remarkable musicians – Voyage may not be their greatest album, but it is a work of great skill, full of enjoyment and pathos in equal measure, and dripping in nostalgia. Tack så mycket, ABBA.
- Blair Martin.