ABBA Voyage: General Discussion 2021 Sept - Dec

Have they changed their style? I think Voyage is quintessentially ABBA and is more traditional of their style than The Visitors was.

Well, yes and no. It's... in their own words... "now and then combined" :-)

I thought about my top 20 Abba songs..one came from Waterloo, 1 from Abba, 4 from Arrival, 4 from the album, 2 from Voulez Vous 3 from Super Trouper 2 from The Visitors and three from Voyage. My three from Voyage are DSMD ISHFIY and Ode to Freedom. I love Bumblee too for its message and the beauty of the song.

To be fair to the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday they have given the album itself very positive reviews. Understanding that they have stayed with their roots and not modernised their sound. Unlike The Guardian and one or two others who didn’t get that.

Super Trouper had The title track and The Winner Takes It All as the first two tracks. Apart from Lay All Your Love On Me, the rest weren’t great for me.

I think the rest of Voyage after the singles is of a higher standard than Super Trouper, although the singles aren’t quite as good. But I didn’t expect them to be. Those two were perfect.

I find the album fresh and varied. My only criticism would be trying to hear some of the backing lyrics a bit difficult. Think Michael might have made them a bit more hearable or used the Abba Dust he once mentioned. Abba set such high standards, its hard to pick a favourite album.

You can compare Voyage to previous ABBA albums. It's still the same people involved.

Onlyabba4meagain - first DM article did get it wrong about sales awards. But valid point about public being interested in ABBA generally, Mamma Mia! the forthconing Abbatars more than the studio albums. That is true.

SwedeDreamz - I agree with you on a couple of points you raised.

1. The Guardian did indeed complain ABBA were stuck in the past. They were just being ABBA. They could have gone diwn the Paul McCartney or Elton John route of working with other artists - but that is cringy.
2 Voyage is better than Super Trouper.

Madonabba - in your list of Top 20 songs you say only 1 from 'Abba'. Missing out SOS or Mamma Mia?


I think the first two singles ISHFIY and DSMD are the best songs from Voyage. But clearly not the only good songs. I guess after 35 years the creativity came out in those songs. The more songs you do, the more higher chance of more songs that aren't so good.

There's clearly a couple of tracks on Voyage that are fillers. But there are always fillers on albums.

Gamleman - yep, Frida does sound older in the ballads ( I love ISHFIY and OTF just not BB or LT). On NDAI she does indeed sound much younger. Perhaps it would have been nice to have one more uptempo or at least nid tempo song from Frida at expense of LT or BB


Agnetha sounds much younger and it does work with ger in KAEOD.

From the Abba album my choice for my top 2o was S.O.S. Mamma Mia just losing out. But ask me in 6 months and my song list may change. S.O.S will always ,along with a few others, be in my Top 20. I like Abba challenging new topics like climate change rather than just another relationship song. Even Dan is a relationship song with a difference. Pity not being able to hear the male response too well...suggesting that the doubt is not one sided.

It's a strange task to compare Voyage to its immediate predecessor, The Visitors. Despite Bjorn's chuckled comments, I seriously doubt that even ABBA do. 39 years is a massive gap. In many ways, we're blessed that Agnetha's and Frida's voices haven't aged more than they have. As much as we love them they can't defy biology and nature. We heard the first very tiny hints of age creeping in - only here and there - on A. It actually added a lovely texture to the sound. So the vocals are the vocals. They could have papered over the cracks with Autotune, but I love that they completely avoided that. The fact that the vocals on Just A Notion don't clash with the rest of the album is a testament to the still remarkable strength of the voices.

To measure the songwriting and the production, I think you really have to somehow imagine that Chess, the two Gemini albums and Josefin Nilsson's album were ABBA albums with guest vocalists. To me, had Chess been an ABBA project, it would have been an incredible follow-up to The Visitors. So tick that off the list. We're up to 1985 now? The first Gemini album shows how B&B's production had moved on. The sound is leaden, the lyrics often clunky - I think that working on musicals completely changed how Bjorn wrote lyrics. The pop directness of If It Wasn't For The Nights and Under Attack gave way to very detailed scene-setting lyics that sometimes didn't scan very comfortably. They took Just Like That and, in fairness, improved the verse and lyrics but they derailed a perfectly good chorus by adding extra lines that would have worked better as a middle eight. Its time in the Chess waiting room undermined its pop glory. They got some of their pop mojo back on the brighter of the two Gemini albums, Geminism, but they still saw fit to include those mortifying lyrics on Ghost Town. Move on to the early 90s and Josefin Nilsson's Shapes is a pretty conservative production. Too safe for her edgy voice, IMO. Melodically, it's good. The lyrics are too detailed - dressing gowns and art know-it-alls have no place in pop lyrics - and the production sounds like it's still in the late 80s - mumsy and Cliff Richardish. So to my (biased) ears, Voyage seems more like an excellent return to form.

It is an imperfect album. For me, the imperfections are not in the vocals - they're in the production and the engineering. The lyrics are roughly what I expected after the albums listed above. The ballad-leaning pace, the instrumentation and the knowing corniness here and there are all perfectly appropriate for people who are in their 70s and who were never exactly the kinds of artists to bite the heads off bats or throw a telly out of a hotel window. What I most dislike about Voyage is the flutes. They're bloody everywhere. IMO, Bumblebee would have been immeasurably more special if the production was more like Frida's Lugna Vatten. But hey, if they wanted me to produce the album, they would've called. 

Nobody expected Voulez-Vous II, surely? But I do get that the album won't be for everyone - not even some die-hard fans. I think we'll all get a better handle on Voyage when we've gotten past this first rush and when we've forgotten to play it for a while. Coming back to it, I bet many of us will find our opinions and our favourites will have changed. Getting on people's backs because their opinions differ to ours doesn't reflect well on a bunch of (mostly) middle aged adults.

After reading Tony's great post, I wondered whether I should bother! But I will, anyway. 

On the whole, as of now, I can say I prefer the ABBA of Voulez-Vous and The Visitors than Voyage; and it'll probably stay that way.

Regarding their vocals, I think both women sound older. Even in the widely highly-regarded DSMD, Agnetha's voice, especially in the slow sung preamble, sounds older to me; and it makes me wonder how her voice would have sounded in the vocally very 'exposing' lead of the slow ISHFIY. I still like their singing in both songs, though. But the chorus of DSMD doesn't have the power and sparkle of 40 years ago - not to me, anyway.
Agree that Frida's singing sounds older, but in NDAI she sounds, to my ears, like she turned the clock back (almost) over three decades.

However, since the 70s, my tastes in popular music have changed quite a bit, and I was half expecting, half hoping, that ABBA would do a few different things, musically - though I don't quite know what.

Those flutes are rather omnipresent lol

Of course Agnetha and Frida's voices have aged, that's a given. But why is that seen as problematic or whatever? It adds a new depth. Personally, that isn't even something I particularly care about. It adds a new pathos. I find it quite moving. I really don't understand what some fans expect(ed)? I was fairly certain we wouldn't get another Dancing Queen or whatever. The chorus of Don't Shut Me Down evokes the AꓭBA of old to some degree but I never for one moment expected any of the new songs to totally capture that incredible alchemy the two combined voices once had. It's still there, but slightly dimmed. That made it all the more precious to me. The passage of time indeed.

I guess it's true you can't please everyone and neither should you. Be rather strange if everyone agreed.

Do die-hard fans really listen to Gold? I think I have listened to it maybe a handful of times since its release in 1992. I prefer to listen to the studio albums. And if I want a 'Greatest Hits' album, I listen to Vol 1, Vol 2 or The Singles. Actually, I went through quite a fallow period of listening to ABBA relatively rarely until I got back into vinyl about 10 years ago. Since then they have been back on my 'playlist', as is the case for a lot of my older albums from the 70s and 80s.

I don't like the sequencing of Gold. It starts off with two tracks from "Arrival" - I've got this thing about not having two consecutive tracks from the same album on a Greatest Hits album (unless it's chronological). Then they've got the two Spanish-flavoured tracks "Chiquitita" and "Fernando" next to each other - they should have been spaced out. In my mind, the track order isn't very well thought-out.