ABBA

Most people know ABBA from Dancing Queen and maybe Take a Chance on Me and like to dance to these tunes at parties but otherwise kind of laugh the band off as lightweight pop by 1970s Euros, unaware of the full oeuvre. Yes, they made a lot of clunker songs (the ones that made their two disc ABBA Gold greatest hits set were notably: Thank You For the Music, When All is Said and Done, and The Way Old Friends Do). Their massive worldwide popularity allowed them to be easily dismissed as not musically noteworthy, but again bland homogeneity or pure unsophistication of the fandom shouldn’t by itself condemn the music.

Admittedly, I discovered ABBA like almost everyone else in the U.S. did: Dancing Queen was played hourly on every AM Top 40 station in the country (or at least the ones in Rochester) through the winter of 1976. In the early 80s I got the TV-advertised 8-Track The Magic of ABBA, which contained their quintessential hits repertoire, and I listened to it incessantly.

The good songs are really well written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, who of course became world renowned composers of musicals. But the most important aspect of ABBA’s sound are the rich vocal harmonies by Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. These are often multilayered in the studio tracks, with complex, often slightly discordant chord configurations evocative of Eastern Europe. The production and arrangement of most of their songs are superior for their period. They later got caught into the vortex of disco and later pop trends (but note that Dancing Queen, which became identified as a disco standard, came out about two years before the period in which disco dominated pop. Pretty visionary considering that disco evolved from American soul and funk.)

Three songs that emphasize the best of the ABBA sound are

S.O.S. (1975)
[embedding was not available for this video]

The Name of the Game (1977)



and Chiquitita (1979)