Did ABBA ever make a bad record?
For fans of the Swedish group’s nearly two dozen U.S. hits, including ear candy like “Dancing Queen” and “Mamma Mia,” it’s probably hard to imagine anything not being close to irresistible.
“The Albums,” a nine-disc retrospective from Polar Music lets us hear 90 ABBA recordings, and almost 80 have at least some trace of the group’s trademark effervescence. That’s a success ratio level that few musicians can match.
The back story: ABBA’s first U.S. hit, “Waterloo,” had such an uplifting charm in 1974 that you couldn’t help but fall under its spell even though the bouncy, lightweight record was about as far as you could get from the “serious” rock music of the time. If anyone ever sounded like a one-hit wonder, it was ABBA, which consisted of writer-singer-producers Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and singers Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.
But the hits kept coming.
Whether on sentimental ballads like “Fernando” or frantic dance floor numbers such as “Take a Chance on Me,” ABBA packed its music with such universal, high- spirited emotion that it’s no wonder audiences fell in love with it all over again, thanks to the musical “Mamma Mia!”
By the time “Dancing Queen” hit in 1976, even the rock community was starting to embrace the group. Elvis Costello and his producer- sidekick Nick Lowe were among its most vocal champions.
Still, most fans thought of ABBA as a singles group rather than an album maker, which helps explain why none of the group’s eight studio albums made the U.S. Top 10.
The music: Although “The Albums” includes the ABBA hits, the treat is in exploring the remaining material and a few rarities — and there are lots of surprises. Among them: an early, unsuccessful attempt to move into the more substantial singer-songwriter style that was so influential in the ’70s and an electro-charged medley of folk tunes, including “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Midnight Special.”
Ulvaeus and Andersson, who later composed the music for the stage production “Chess,” sometimes reached beyond the fluffy ABBA sound but were at their best when they stuck to the formula.
Sometimes, though, things were too light, such as the tropical corn of “Sitting in the Palmtree.”
My nomination for the best ABBA track that wasn’t a U.S. hit: “When I Kissed the Teacher,” a zestful number that recalls the teen passion of such Phil Spector productions as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” Runner-up: the zany, super-charged “Bang-a-Boomerang.”
There was clearly more to ABBA than the hits, and this set is proof.
