Albums of the Year # 32 ABBA - Voyage

 

I've been listening to ABBA's back catalogue over the last couple of weeks as part of an immersion based music listening group on social media that I'm part of. Firstly, through the Seventies, when virtually the only records my parents bought were ABBA ones. Then into the Eighties when they stopped buying them, except perhaps for the Best Of  ones on CD. It's been an interesting ride through my childhood memories.

Of course ABBA's initial run was always going to be a finite one though they made the very most of it, because my god, they were talented. But their subject matter was fundamentally love, desire and relationships and there are only so many variations on those themes on offer, fundamental as they are.You can't keep making records about that stuff all your life, or at least ones worth listening to, no matter how good you are. 

Listening through to the original albums one by one, it's interesting to see them coming up with various takes on those themes though. The themes? Isn't it great falling in love. Isn't it awful falling out of love and having to divide up your possessions. Slightly dubious jailbeat dancefloor and schoolyard stuff. One that appears to be about sex addiction, (Gimme Gimme).Then the ones that are not directly about these things. I'm on the stage, look at me. Rehearsals for the West End musicals that Bjorn and Benny were always destined to deliver. Boom bang a bang schlager songs. And, I'm not actually a person, I'm really an animal or a bird. There are only two of those. Shame really, they're two of their best. Delightfully, there's one about insects on Voyage, (though I'm jumpling slightly ahead), and it's another delightful one in Bumblebees. They're older now and quite content to stand at the kitchen window and watch what's going on in their back gardens.

So, miraculously in 2021, ABBA are back. I'm pleased to report that they're still very, very good. As good as they ever were really. Well they would be. They're ABBA aren't they? They've also found an appropriate new theme. Getting older and slightly wiser and reflecting. Like The Beatles albums and ABBA's old ones, this is a grab-bag of styles. Something for everybody. Everybody that is except for people who don't like ABBA. They're highly unlikely to convert any in that particular camp at this late stage.

Because this is ABBA, as you remember them. Except that now they're ABBA in their Seventies. It suits them really. We'll all get old. I'm well on the way myself. But if you get old like ABBA, you've not done badly, because they still remember how it's done and on Voyage, their new, and we're told, their final act as recording artists, they definitely do it.

I like it all really. The ones that I don't like so much, because they're not so much aligned with my own personal taste, I still recognise how good they are. There are precious few artists in Rock and Roll history, (if you conside them part of that and I would), who can move you and make you tap into specific, deeply ingrained, fundamental emotions as well as ABBA do. They do that one last time on Voyage.

So, they do ageing, they do Christmas. ABBA were always bound to do Christmas at some point or another and this is certainly good enough to be this year's John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack. They do West End musicals. They do love.They do it all in that measured, stately, graceful, and ever so ever so slightly sentimental way, (OK, really sentimental), that only they can really do. 

They save the best 'til last with Ode To Freedom, which is one of the best things they've ever done, an altogether glorious and moving last hurrah, (classically arranged, ABBA's understanding of the classical was always extraordinary), before they take their final bows and leave the stage. It's appropriate really giving that they first appeared onstage in a brilliant flash in 1974 in the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo an anthem to Europe, and it seems they're finally leaving the stage with another one and astonishingly with a song that's just as good as Waterloo was and is.

Now to milk it. To put their feet up and watch their own virtual concerts next year and wait for the applause, and, thinking more cynically, for the cash tills to ring. Boy, do they deserve both. One of the most surprising and successful musical returns I can think of.