ABBA in the 80s, cracking up?

I chose the first one as I'm not fond of bonustracks. they always ruin the composition of the original album, but that's something for another thread...

Anyway, when I put the CD in my player...it was so miserable, so beautiful...

Super Trouper is a better album than The Visitors, is what I've decided since buying them both on super digital enhanced nu CD.

So, Tom, tell us your feelings on Husker Du and Bob Mould in particular.

(Worst tracks on each - "The Piper" and "Slipping Through My Fingers" - are disasterous. The real narrative of Abba isn't the divorce one but wanting to be pop stars vs wanting to write musicals. "Super Trouper" itself as disillusioned a road-song as you'd find in any genre).

"very few" != "none".

Personal to Erik: let's hang out sometime, eh?

Agnetha's cry introducing One Of Us, isn't that the sound of a beautiful (slightly overproduced) dying white swan?

of course their use of english didn't improve very much on their last album, actually it reminds me of my own regular posts to ILM, when my native tongue is (personal to Sean:) Dutch.

but, Sean, as there are probably ten-thousand miles between us, I'd suggest your plane or mine, and then marry...oops I mean meet somewhere in the middle?

well, carry on ILM visitors!

http://www.abbasite.com/infocus/

The thought occurs to me however that history hasn't been kind to Abba as individuals; broken marriages, Agneta's disastrous private life, Anna-Frid's tragic family history etc

bbbut!! ABBA have GREAT GRAMMAR!! ...The Visitors is one of my favorite albums. Better than Super Trouper because it's just got the songs, which is more important than cheesiness (right? uh, I think so)

After reading this thread I devoted a little article to Abba on jahsonic.com which went like this:

"Imagine me, recommending or wishing for an Abba album. Well, I just did, didn't I. Why? Because of a thread on the "I Love Music" board. My initial response was/is: "Why should I bother checking out a mainstream act like Abba?" But, hell, the tread has been on my mind since 24 hours and I was quite unsettled, which is a reason in itself to share my feelings about it. The recommendations for Abba on Amazon are nothing but other ABBA records, the music of ABBA does NOT connect and I still believe that the ABBA fanbase are musically lazy. "

And then ... this afternoon I drove by one of the second hand dealers here in Antwerp and there were eight copies of the Visitors in the window. I bought one for 3 Euro 70 and listened to it.

The verdict: one of the least enjoyable listening sessions I subjected myself to. The voice, the instrumentatins, the drums, the sleeve ... I could not find one redeeming quality in it.

I compiled a couple of new pages I would like to share with you.

http://www.jahsonic.com/Taste.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/Class.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/Snob.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/Rare.html
http://www.jahsonic.com/Mainstream.html

Yours
Jan

It doesn't have the psychological intrigue and depth of The Visitors but as a demonstration of one of ABBA's core strengths - fabulously catchy pop songs - it's terrific.

I've been listening to Voulez-Vous quite a lot too, some great tracks on that ("As Good As New") but it's harder to love.

Will "Dancing Queen" get a 10 or has overfamiliarity blunted its initial impact?

btw, re: 80s, I love "Under Attack".

Does anyone remember the name of the writer in NY Rocker who often championed Abba, Bucks Fizz and the like?

The Visitors is one of my favorite albums ever. It's a world beyond their pop singles, so if you haven't heard it...

Arrival is indeed the other solid pop album.

Going through old videotapes I found the video for "The Day Before You Came" again and it slaughtered me, it's so surreal and painful, completely worthy of the song.

The video for "Day Before You Came" reminds me a great deal of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

probably both and if so double-impact for the knowing listener

Who else besides me bought this album because of Taylor Parkes?

I'm surprised at some of the hate on this thread for "Slipping Through My Fingers". During the chorus, the vocals sound like they're being played on a badly warped record. ABBA's queasiest moments, for sure.

Yeah, that and the fact that it's one of the best songs on the record. I put The Visitors on this morning and noticed the same thing about the varispeed thing (though I think it's the bridge, Mind). Really remarkable...

I just got this. Wow. "Head Over Heels" is genius -- it's the sinister subtext underpinning the careerism that would dominate lots of eighties pop ("She Works Hard For the Money," "What A Feelin'").

i haven't heard "the day before you came" in a long time. i should rectify that.

A very underrated album (although it got its rightful and well-deserved place in "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die"). ABBA's best IMO.

"My Love, My Life" - it's oof of Arrival, it should have been on Visitors. An amazing song.

Going to play The Visitors in the car in a few minutes

XP: I guess it would have been on "The Visitors" hadn't it already been released on another album 5 years earlier. :)

Now here's some appropriate cover art:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6f/Daybeforeyoucame.jpg

PHWOAR!

I once played My Love, My Life 17 straight times. Listening to the Visitors now. A little too restrained for me, ultimately

Also:

"The Day Before You Came" and "Under Attack"--each of which I love--get much deserved love, but not far behind is "Cassandra" -- an absolutely classic Abba chorus and an arrangement that sounds as if Vangelis were comping in the bgd...

Another path they only hinted at pursuing -- and what's with so little love for "I Am the City"?

TPL on Super Trouper, the album: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/abba-super-trouper.html

Another fantastic ABBA essay, Marcello. I don't think they've every been covered so well.

so strange I was listening to teh Day Before you Came thsi morning and thinking of starting a thread about that song.
I've heard the popular alternative interpretations of that song being adressed to a killer or to death itself - and it's true that you wonder why the narrator would sound so pathetic supposedly singing to her new lover - also that heartwrenching coda.
What really gets me though is how the song paints such a clear picture of the balaity of loneliness.

banality of loneliness, even

I read it as someone who's just lost her lover, thinking about the excitement and passion they brought into her life, and then reflecting on how it's time to get used to living in this humdrum pattern again now they're gone.

I like songs written by people who have presumably never had normal jobs that contain references to normal jobs. The details are always so generic: "With letters to be read, and heaps of papers waiting to be signed." I realise of course that Day Before You Came is supposed to describe a generic life.

I like the weird phrasings too:

"And still on top of this I'm pretty sure it must have rained"
"There's not, I think, a single episode of dallas that I didn't see"
"And turning out the light / I must have yawned and cuddled up for yet another night / And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain"

It's Prufrock set to music.

haha yeah - maybe cuz it's the one ABBA song where I do pay attention to the lyrics, when I heard it again this morning I understood what people meant by ABBA's odd euro-english.

I read it as someone who's just lost her lover, thinking about the excitement and passion they brought into her life, and then reflecting on how it's time to get used to living in this humdrum pattern again now they're gone.

Err, how can that be - the whole point of that song is to describe the last 24 hours of the humdrum aimlessness of the narrator's life before the arrival of some life changing person.

I dated a Swedish girl for a while who used very similar phrasings.
This song is far too dark to be from the perspective of someone whose life was just changed for the better.

exactly.
"It's funny, but I had no sense of living without aim" - that stings

Bjorn confirmed that it was meant to be something dark but didn't say what exactly.

So, what happened the day after this guy came? Whatever it is, it’s not good is it?
Interviewing Bjorn in 2010, I got the chance to ask him directly. “Ah, you’ve spotted it, haven’t you?” he said. “The music is hinting at it. You can tell in that song that we were straining towards musical theatre. We really got Agnetha to act the part of the person in that song. In retrospect, it might have been too much of a change for a lot of Abba fans. The energy had gone.”

http://besidethebside.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/abba-cassandra-you-owe-me-one.html

really? so it's supposed to be moving from mediocrity towards outright malevolence? that's never how i read it. the "you" in the story is a benign entity and now it's gone.

Well nobody's reading of a song is wrong but I think your reading is wrong.

not sure this is the song Bjorn meant to write, per se, but the way I've always heard it is that she's still with the guy but pretty profoundly unhappy in the relationship. the line about Marilyn French is pretty telling, I think -- that's really specific in a way that can't possibly be accidental. the thing that gets me is how it's supposedly a love song but it's really a monologue, because there's no way she's actually singing it to him. like, you wouldn't tell him "I need a lot of sleep, and so I like to be in bed by then" because of course he'd already know.

fwiw Tom Ewing had more or less a similar take: http://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/24355545324/the-day-before-you-came-1982-single-the-final

All interesting stuff.

I have my own theories about the song but it'll be another couple of Then Play Long years before I get the chance to write about it.

interesting take from Tom E. but I'm not sure I buy the idea that the narrator is longing for her former independence - for me it is still a portrayal of loneliness and the sad aimlessness of our daily lives. However, it's true that the frozen howls of the coda don't seem to herald the arrival of someone/something particularly postitive. Man, I really love that song.

did critics rave about TDBYC at the time of release?

no

Neither did record buyers; the single only got to #32.

Disgraceful, but it was a bit long for a single, I remember the video being played more than the song itself

The Blancmange cover was a bigger hit. It was a disgrace.

It was sung with a smirk, that time.

.. the book was "the latest one by Barbara Cartland, or something in that style" . o ho ho..

Do I want to hear the Blancmange cover?
Also, are there any other songs capturing like that the ennui and aimlessness of daily life? Might need tos tart a thread

To be fair (and less UK-centric), it still went top 5 in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Belgium. Their previous single "Head Over Heels" was the first to miss the top 20 in the UK after six and a half years of continuous top 10 hits, so they were already losing touch with the UK public before they came up with TDBYC.

Head Over Heels is my favourite Abba song. Kinda wish they'd done a couple more albums. Obviously there were complications. Would they have developed the synthy sound or just had more straightforward 80s adult pop production like other 70s survivors?

Anyway, after thinking about the song a bit, I've had Day Before You Came in my head for the last 48 hours. This kind of thing can distort your life, in a mean way.

^ re: TDBYC - oh yes.

You can really beat the "One of Us"/ "Should I Laugh or Cry" single - what a pairing!

I really like the video for TDBYC.

TPL on The Visitors: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/abba-visitors.html