Abba Voyage- The Album

*** for quality

***** for gratitude

This is an album that isn’t as good as you hoped, but isn’t as bad as you feared. Thank fuck.

My first listen to the two new tracks released back in November 2021 was joyous. Don’t Shut Me Down in particular seemed to capture the essence of ABBA and update it just enough to prevent it from sounding tired or contrived. Knowing that this and it’s companion piece I Still Have Faith In You were the first of the new tracks to be recorded, I was hopeful that their recording sessions would yield tracks of even higher quality.

Well, like any Abba album, Voyage turned out to be a mixed bag, and the two lead tracks clearly the best by quite some margin. In fact I would say they are stone cold classics, and naturally the rest of the album simply can’t compete.

What we do get is a snappy listen, and an album that only Abba could make. Thankfully they have used a lot of the surviving musicians from their glory years, and done the whole thing themselves. The whole enterprise has a sheen of authenticity. Sadly, Michael B Tretow, their sound engineer and Peter Mandelson of Abba, has been ill for quite sometime and was unable to work his magic, its a big loss to the overall production but one that couldn’t be avoided.

Like any Abba album, their are a mixture of joint and solo leads from Agnetha and Frida. Both are in pretty good voice, although I think I do detect a hint of auto-tune or pitch correction here and there. However, I think that is permissable, as these guys have proven many times that they can hold a note. Changes in their voices means Frida now dominates joint vocals, whereas historically it was always Agnetha. If you listen to the chorus of Just A Notion, which uses vocals recorded in the late 70’s, with Don’t Shut Me Down, you can clearly hear the difference.

Like any Abba album, the style of the tracks vary too. When You Danced With Me is Irish folk with an overload of electronic bagpipes, Little Things is a strangely sedate christmas song, Keep An Eye On Dan a dramatic synth driven song about child visitation arrangements, No Doubt About It an up tempo banger with liberal use of banjo, and the albums others true highlight, Ode to Freedom is virtually classical music. Elsewhere Just a Notion is a boogie-woogie rehash of an unreleased track from the 1978, Bumblebee a meditation on ecology set to panpipes, and finally I Can Be That Woman is a country and western song about a dog, domestic violence and alcoholism which I’m not sure would win any feminist awards.

Overall I think history will judge this album well. Yes it has an updated production, but it isn’t wall to wall modern synths, yes they sound older, and yes the mixing lacks the clarity that Michael Tretow might have delivered, but this album does not stick out in their catalogue, and I think that is an achievement in itself. The fact that I am able to use the phrase “like any Abba album” so liberally is testament to that. My one major criticism is that some of the tracks feel a little short and unfinished, but what we are left with is an amazing body of work, and an unexpected happy ending for Abba and for their fans.