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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 19:29:57 GMT
[W]e UK ABBA Fans are very lucky. Or not, depending on how much of an exercise in kitsch self-idolatry you believe this avatars exercise to be. Certainly, a 'purpose-built stadium' seems extravagantly needless, and not especially 'green', unless they've taken an existing building and are making not-too-drastic modifications to it.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 18:07:33 GMT
Yeah, it's an irreversible action. I meant reconsider as in: create a new account.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 17:31:39 GMT
Going back through the thread, though, we haven't been especially doing that. Must be for another reason. Edit: Curious. His last post to date quotes one of his own posts from a couple of years ago from this thread, and is posted in that same thread.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 17:25:07 GMT
I hope it's not because we're sticking up for songs he'd listed as being among his 'weak' nominations? Edmund, if you're reading this, reconsider! As you've said yourself in the wake of past misinterpretations or instances of 'wires crossed', differences of opinion are a positive thing and are the life-blood of a place like this (see how activity has picked up here, now that we've been given - via your thread - the chance to engage in a bit of subjective back-and-forth?!)
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 17:01:42 GMT
Suzy-Hang-Around I dislike because of the subject matter. They clearly want to ostracise poor Suzy and make her feel unwanted. It almost amounts to bullying. If there was a happy ending to it and the protagonists realised the error of their ways then it would be palatable, but they ignore her mum’s pleas and laugh it all off as though that’s OK. Horrible lyrics. However, it’s Benny’s only solo and musically I quite like it. Good point. I'd never considered the song from this angle, being a fan of Benny's singing and so being taken by the track purely on the basis that it's his only lead vocal of the 'proper' years, but you're right, at root it's mean-spirited. I suppose in its defence you could say they were being true to the sort of emotional callousness that kids can be possessed of before they've properly developed an ability to be empathetic or diplomatic, but the fact that the shunning of Suzy gets reiterated without relief makes it a bit ill-conceived.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2021 16:22:39 GMT
[T]he one track of ABBA's whole career that irritates me most of all is You Owe Me One, as I really don't understand 1) how they were able to produce this kind of song so late during their career and 2) how they could release this one and withhold I Am The City and Just Like That... I Am The City has stylistic/conceptual connections to You Owe Me One, having a somewhat similar - rather off-putting - supercilious vibe, although the result isn't half as bad (because more appropriate to the song's theme, and more smoothly integrated?). YOMO getting the nod might be a case of ABBA really trying to chime with the times (in this case, the narcissistic pop scene that came out of New Romanticism and the related nascent cocktails-and-power-suits stuff that early MTV would latch onto). They'd already shown with Voulez-Vous that they could quite abruptly have their heads turned by trending styles at the expense of resolutely developing and deepening what had become more-or-less their own thing. (ABBA were always broadly trend-followers rather than setters, it has to be conceded. It can be no coincidence that their strongest work, spanning the period from the eponymous '75 album through to ABBA The Album, occurred only once they'd thoroughly apprenticed themselves to the first styles that inspired them - folk, schlager, British Invasion pop, glam and singer-songwriter AOR - and created syntheses that were distinctively their own.)
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Post by chron on Mar 26, 2021 16:41:36 GMT
Nice of you not to dismiss the duet idea out of hand, although it probably deserves to be! The male/female pop duet is a hard one to get right. I can't offhand think of many examples that don't make for a somewhat uncomfortable listen, in some way. Take one that Frida eventually recorded, the version of Here We'll Stay done with Phil Collins. In working to point up the supposed chemistry between the two of them, they succeed only in establishing that hardly any exists. That would be a general problem with this type of duet: recordings predicated on some notion of rapport existing between two singers that isn't there in reality, making the 'connection' come off as forced. The thing that makes me think a Frida/Benny effort on One Man, One Woman might've fared better than most is the fact that they were a real couple; the male/female pop duets that most convince have been done by people either in a relationship, or with a shared past history (e.g. Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Richard and Linda Thompson, John and Beverley Martyn). Despite not sharing lead vox on it, I think I'm right in saying that Benny made a substantial vocal contribution to OMOW nevertheless - orchestrating the vocal harmonies, and laying one or more of those down himself (expressly a falsetto one).
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 19:18:02 GMT
I like Under Attack quite a bit, although it feels as though there's something 'missing' in it, somehow. It's sort of cold and distanced and perfunctory, which perhaps fits with the general feeling within the band regarding the 'grind' of creating new material when it was made, and maybe it's this that I like. I like artists who are able to create things out of defiance, when engagement and joie de vivre have gone AWOL.
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 19:02:18 GMT
Yeah, I Am Just A Girl barely feels like an ABBA song; the slippers-and-Horlicks style of it reminds me of the The Cliff Adams Singers (old farts from the UK will remember their parents or grandparents listening to this lot's Sing Something Simple radio show). You Owe Me One is, as Edmund suggests, the biggest abomination of their later years; ABBA at their most bombastic and snarky-sounding.
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 18:41:25 GMT
Sure! (Actually, I think there's hardly anything to call a truce over). I'm aware I come over as a bit brusque sometimes, Edmund, but I respect your views, and those of everyone else here, even if they don't always chime with my own, you can be certain of that. Also, I liked your misspelling, as I said!
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 17:07:35 GMT
I was 'orf' (chosen because it incorporated some name initials, plus it also evoked the Austrian media network of the same acronym) but I ended up thinking it made me sound like a woodland sprite or something. Edit: I opted not to re-introduce myself, because I thought my animosity towards The Winner Takes It All might act as a calling-card :-)
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 16:16:19 GMT
To get back - more or less - to the gist of the thread: one thought I've had in broad relation to the theme is wondering if a Frida/Benny duet on One Man, One Woman would've come off. They could've alternated solo vox on the verses, and sung the choruses together, either as call-and-response kind of thing or in some sort of melody/harmony config. I've no doubt bored people here with this subject before, but I really happen to rate Benny's singing voice (much more so, it seems, than the man himself), and One Man, One Woman is an ABBA song as suffused with the aura of the Frida/Benny connection as The Winner Takes It All is with the Agnetha/Bjorn one. Off-topic edit: just spotted that Edmund typoed my updated username above, and I like it so much I'm tempted to adopt it: Chrongington, I think your comments are harsh and hurtful Chrongington, you're wrongington!
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 16:02:20 GMT
I consider Agnetha's version to be the ultimate one. So I'm with Alan . If you listen carefully, you can almost hear her voice break on certain lines ("and I understand you've come to shake my hand") and it makes one believe her what she's singing - but I understand these over-emotional moments actually irritate you :-) - each to their own. Trying not to smash shells with my clodhoppers here, but that bit you've highlighted is, for me, a pure instance of emoting (viz. acting), and you don't have to listen that carefully in order to hear it. Likely B&B had homed in on that passage you highlight as the cathartic, nadir-as-apex from which the song's wind-up/wind-down would be launched, and I can imagine one or other of them (from behind the glass of the control desk, in my mind's picture, just as they're seen at the end of The Movie!) encouraging Agnetha to get a little wobble into her voice at that point, an effect prepped for by opting to have the passage almost semi-spoken against a hushed backing (with the resigned riposte "But you see.." being completely spoken - speaking in songs seeming more artless and thus more 'authentic' being the thinking, perhaps?). For me, it's precisely an example of the sort of faked emotion (in the neutral, art-is-artifice sense) that Alan believes is being avoided because, you know, she lived it. Which leads to another thought: could she not have, if the subject in this case were so raw and personal to her, pushed herself to pen or co-pen the song's lines, in order to avoid having words, weighed down with hard to credit craps/card-game/sports arena metaphors (as well as that fearful sense/fence rhyme), put into her mouth by the very person who had broken up with her in real life? Talk about loaded dice!
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 1:41:48 GMT
It is possible to be an ABBA fan and still not be able to appreciate the appeal of certain of their songs, you know (actually, probably only a fan would bother taking the time to think and reason out some of why and how it is that they dislike certain ABBA songs; a non-fan just wouldn't care to learn).
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Post by chron on Mar 24, 2021 0:45:55 GMT
^^^ But the whole point of The Winner Takes It All is that it’s about Björn and Agnetha’s marriage break-up! No one else but Agnetha could have sang it, the lyrics would have meant nothing otherwise [...] It would be a fake sentiment if someone who hadn’t been through that experience sang it. Nah, I'm not buying that. The song's theme, such as it is, is universal enough for anyone to identify with. Almost everyone has gone through some sort of emotional upheaval, and a decent singer would be able to draw on and transmute such personal memories in order to colour their interpretation of TWTIA's core theme. The problem would be that a lot of great singers would be wary of Bjorn's wearying love-is-like-a-crapshoot analogising, the symbolic over-egging. (Side thought: is one of the reasons the song seems so contrived the fact that it's hard to believe a woman like Agnetha would use such clunky gambling metaphors as a means of articulating her anguish? I certainly find that aspect hard to credit.)
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Post by chron on Mar 23, 2021 18:57:47 GMT
Chrongington, I think your comments are harsh and hurtful [...] I think as long things don't get personal, disagreements are fine and natural (indeed sometimes desirable). And speaking of disagreements, there will a fair few in this forum I'd wager who will take issue with what I'm about to say, but here goes in any case: I sometimes wonder if ABBA shouldn't have considered drafting in an outside singer to handle lead vocals in one or two rare instances, rather in the way that Pink Floyd got in Roy Harper to sing lead vox on Have A Cigar or Squeeze drafted in Paul Carrack to handle the lead singing on Tempted (Since this is all academic if-the-queen-had-balls stuff, no one should be too offended by the idea!) I'm going to go to my grave being unmoved by the supposed magic of The Winner Takes It All, but since Agnetha's vocal on it (specifically her choice of how to sing it) has always been a specific rankle, I like to imagine an alternate world where Benny and Bjorn decided to forgo Agnetha and Frida and get in someone like Karen Carpenter or Randy Crawford to sing the lead on that one (for those wondering about the reasoning behind the latter choice, Randy did a super job on a lesser known track, one lying stylistically somewhat outside of her usual bailiwick (although she creates a synthesis), Hoping Love Will Last, featured on Steve Hackett's Please Don't Touch! album).
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Post by chron on Mar 23, 2021 15:19:49 GMT
Should they swap lead vocals on either I don't think the songs would be as powerful. [...] There are so many other songs that should Agnetha and Frida alter on lead the impetus would be lost. I disagree with this right down the line. It's a sort of confirmation bias: because things panned out the way they did, things panned out the way they should have. Given their technical solidity (I prefer to put it this way, since my jury's still out on whether or not solidity and versatility are the same thing), I'm betting that Frida and Agnetha could've swapped vocal 'spotlights' with each other in almost every instance and produced the 'right and proper' result. Agnetha would surely have done a corkingly fragile version of I Wonder, for example, and Frida would've been my preferred choice for The Winner Takes It All, since I think she'd have had the gumption - based on her jazzier formative years - to rein-in the vocal emoting, given the already highly emotive lyrical content of the song.
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Post by chron on Mar 12, 2021 17:38:52 GMT
A sceptic might quietly wonder if the pandemic hasn't been somewhat 'handy' in terms of offering an open-ended reason for delays, since it's hard to take issue with it without coming across as cynical.
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Post by chron on Mar 9, 2021 17:02:06 GMT
Have you guys see the recent answers Bjorn gave to the intermezzo magazine in October? Fixed(!): Those answers from Bjorn were hardly generous Looks as though he had about five seconds to scribble down a couple of answers before urgently dashing off somewhere.
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Post by chron on Oct 28, 2020 17:08:33 GMT
I have talked to someone who was a bit of a popstar in Norway, alongside Agnetha in Sweden, named Inger Lise Rypdal, and who was also signed to Polar. Wow! Terje's wife (ex-wife?)! That's a whole other can, but Terje Rypdal is a wonderful guitar player (plays a number of other instruments with great proficiency too) and composer. Affectingly expressive guitarist. His solo album After The Rain is one of my long-time faves, and I believe that Inger Lise does backing vox on at least one of the tracks. I'm sorry to have say I've never done the research that would've led me to discovering that she'd had an impressive pop career in her own right.
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Post by chron on Oct 28, 2020 15:38:11 GMT
I was also thinking of the lack of an extended solo instrumental on piano, say, from Benny, along similar lines to George Harrison's guitar solo in 'Something', for example. But I guess Benny wasn't interested - or too modest. I would certainly like to have heard such a solo from him. I've mentioned this before: I admire Benny a lot, in terms of his song-writing and arranging and his ability to 'envision' and shape a song, and I'm also one of the few(?) who truly enjoys and rates his singing voice (certainly above Bjorn's), but...I think he doesn't possess a particularly good touch on the keyboards. He's pretty squarely a rhythm keyboardist or tone and texture provider in the main, and his piano playing is often a bit blunt and blatant - he fills up space more than he articulates it. When he does play more softly and sensitively, it seems to be on stuff that's melodically 'gloopy' and that pulls his playing close to 'new age' cornball or Richard Clayderman terrain (e.g. TYFTM or the start of I Wonder). He's not 'jazz' enough, doesn't play with different pressures enough or spring enough interesting, lesser-expected angles. (I'm also not especially keen on the tone of his acoustic piano work, either - whether that's to do with the make(s) of piano, or the studio space or the mic-ing up, others could say). Finally, he's just not a very expressive player for me (as a footballer he'd be a midfield water-carrier, rather than a free-roving, protean finesse player), and given that, I'm quite content with the fact that he's never really foisted solo breaks on us.
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Post by chron on Oct 28, 2020 15:10:22 GMT
Another composed/sung one would be the abrupt change-up in Hole In Your Soul (the result of the unfinished part of one song being incorporated into the body of another, I believe, a la We Can Work It Out and A Day In The Life). (Hole In Your Soul never gets rated as highly as it should, I tend to feel; it seems liked and respected as a solid, well above filler-grade track on The Album for sure, but I think taken as a (w)hole - wink, wink - it deserves a seat at the topmost table, ABBA songs-wise.)
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Post by chron on Aug 6, 2020 3:21:04 GMT
Very familiar of course, to those who grew up with the UK gatefold of The Album, but still a terrific and powerful group photo; one of the best. The togs, the smiles - relaxed but contained, the composition (Benny breaking the full-on symmetry and lending a bit of dynamism; Agnetha's wrist absentmindedly crossed over Frida's), the somewhat 'bleachy' or over-exposed look, giving it an airy, vaporous feel. Plus, it's ABBA taken when they were at the pinnacle. Looking at it you can almost feel it again, as it was then.
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Post by chron on Aug 5, 2020 18:47:48 GMT
Makes you wonder about the whole business of facsimiles of old albums (especially since so many getting these would appear to be the people who have copies of the originals). At any rate, in terms of the packaging, there seems only about one or two ways to go: either anally reproduce everything exactly as was (it's honestly not hard these days to fiddle with the size and thickness and kerning and tracking of typefaces until you've got it spot on, ditto in effect for photos) or do a new presentation that fully honours the spirit of the originals but enhances various aspects. Coloured vinyl, "near-enough" typography and no extra shots from the album cover photo sessions incorporated into a slip-cover or an insert or basic booklet, of inner sleeve dimensions, seems pretty thin gruel.
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Post by chron on Aug 5, 2020 16:42:56 GMT
I wouldn't mind if the recreations of the sleeves were not absolutely true to the originals if they were perfect in every other way... So one of the main things is that the vinyl discs themselves are 'perfect'? It's hard to see how bad pressings would matter that much, if the box is going to function as an ornamental item. Would it be a problem to someone who's never going to give these any turntable time if the 'Side One' and 'Side Two' labels were stuck to the wrong sides? Which would be more of a deal-breaker: completely immaculate labels perfectly centred to the spindle holes of the wrong sides, or slightly imperfect labels slightly imperfectly centred to the right sides? (Edit: I know I shouldn't really be sticking my oar in here, but this is the only thread seeing any decent traffic at the moment!)
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Post by chron on Aug 4, 2020 14:24:17 GMT
Apart from being coloured and not looking like standard black, what do you like best about the coloured vinyl?
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Post by chron on Aug 3, 2020 18:48:41 GMT
Some won't care that much, obvs, but others will be pernickety about every tiny detail being authentically 'just right' (I'd very possibly be in this category myself, if I were an ABBA boxed set collector).
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Post by chron on Aug 3, 2020 18:14:59 GMT
They've not done a particularly outstanding (read: extra-mile faithful) job of recreating the texts, for that matter. See 'The Visitors' comparison pics posted above by gamleman - as he already notes, the white track-list text is taller. It's also more condensed, compared to the older version. As a consequence perhaps, the tracking of white text of the new one is less generous (look how close the descending line of the 'p' in I Let The Music Speak gets to the top of the the 'O' in the 'One' of 'One Of Us on the new cover compared to the old; they're as good as touching). The new 'The Visitors' title text is done in a slightly thinner typeface, with the ends of the 's's quite noticeably not hooking around quite as far as they do on the old line. At any rate, the older one is done more pleasingly, and that's not said from any sort of older-always-equals-better position; that's comes from comparing and contrasting the two, and qualitatively weighing the differences.
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Post by chron on Jul 29, 2020 17:29:00 GMT
I think it's obvious that every collector suffers from OCD to a greater or lesser degree. OCD naturally goes with the territory. There's nothing terribly wrong with people who have it, either. The ABBA reissue programme seems to exploit the tendency to an uncomfortable degree, though. Also, producing the vinyl seems needless if the discs aren't going to be broken out and put on a turntable (as some here have said they won't be). Why not focus on doing reprints of the artwork/packaging alone in some distinctive way instead, and forgo the disc pressing? I doubt their manufacture has much of an impact environmentally, but what a pointless exercise if they're never going to be used as intended.
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Post by chron on Jul 29, 2020 14:40:14 GMT
[...] also wonder how lucrative these limited-edition releases can really be for the record company. How much money can they expect to make from a release of perhaps only 4000 copies of a product, when their profit from each copy is probably only a few pounds or a few tens of pounds. It doesn't seem to amount to a great deal by record company standards, and they would need to take their design and manufacture costs out of this. It's not like in the old days when they could expect to sell several million copies (worldwide) of each ABBA release. They might do them to offset some relatively small expense (that's the office tea-bags and coffee sorted for the year!), since the collector fanatics - if they can get in before the eBay chisellers - can be absolutely solidly relied upon to stump up the subs. Doing a novelty twist on the externals when the moulds and graphic templates and whatnot remain the same wouldn't be especially costly, you'd think (churning dyes or scattering metallic hundreds-and-thousands or whatever into molten vinyl is surely relatively easy, quick and cheap to do) and bingo, you know that your hand is going to be practically bitten off by the same crackers loyal group when you dangle these latest versions of the same old versions in front of them (the serious question of whether or not this is taking advantage of some who are genuinely grappling with some form of OCD hangs in the air).
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