Recording #1: <em>ABBA Gold</em>

• Genre: Pop
• Year: 1992 (Greatest hits compilation, 1974-1979)
• Listened to on: Laptop via Rhapsody
• Tom says: “These tightly scripted songs are an excellent starter kit for those wanting to investigate the DNA of post-Beatles pop.”

Aaron says:

Wait, the first entry in a book on 1,000 essential recordings is a greatest hits collection?! That’s totally cheating. I understand how you’d want to focus on albums rather than individual tracks. But kicking things off with a career retrospective doesn’t sit well with me.

On to the music.

I’ve always appreciated ABBA from a distance. Writing that many catchy pop songs in a five-year period is an impressive feat. Turning those songs into such slick recordings even more so. But the most amazing thing ABBA did was to turn five years of prolific songwriting into a lifetime of royalty checks and spinoffs.

Mamma Mia is the definitive Broadway jukebox musical, and by most accounts the movie was far better than it had any right to be. (I haven’t seen it yet.) Muriel’s Wedding was a terrible movie with a single redeeming line, “my life is as good an ABBA song! It’s as good as Dancing Queen!”

So what is it about these tracks that scream “overproduced late 70′s pop” that makes them compelling today? There’s no depth to the lyrics. Songs like “Money, Money, Money” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” sound like rejects from the long lost Andrew Lloyd Webber musical he tried to write between Cats and Starlight Express. (I’m trying very hard to keep this from veering into a discussion of Chess. There, I got it out of my system.) “Lay All Your Love On Me” is a shameless ripoff of Elton John’s “Funeral For a Friend.”

“Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance” still have those fabulous arrangements, but I haven’t discovered anything deeper or surprising on the album.

Verdict:

I’m still appreciative from a distance, but I can’t imagine adding these songs to my regular listening habits.

2 stars (out of 5) for production quality and catchiness.