Disco from the car

Swedish quartet ABBA released the album “Voyage”, which, along with a selection of greatest hits will form the basis of a new show next year, “ABBA Voyage” with digital avatars of the band members.

Of the ten songs featured on ABBA’s “Voyage” album, three are already familiar to listeners. “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Dont Shut Me Down” were released in September 2021 at the same time as the announcement of the four’s grand plans. The dynamic “Dont Shut Me Down” charted higher than the power ballad “I Still Have Faith in You”. Just a Notion” was written for the album “Voulez-Vous” (1978), but authors Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus deemed it “unsuitable for mixing” and used it only briefly in a medley called “ABBA Undeleted”, that was published on the 1994 “Thank You for the Music”.

The other seven songs have never been published before, but the feeling that you’ve heard them all before doesn’t leave you during the whole “Voyage” listening experience.

ABBA are not the kind of people who are expected to be innovative, and the slogan “Thank you for being alive” is absolutely true in their case.

One of the predictable reactions to the “Voyage” album is the desire to dig deep into the ABBA back catalog. Following this desire, you realize that back then, in the 1970s, ABBA were exactly the innovators, the people whose music had, as the press put it, “irrational perfection.” No one took pop music so seriously, no one could convey its drama so that the whole world danced to it.

In 2021, however, ABBA isn’t going to revolutionize music.

Suffice it to say that they have collaborated with experts from George Lucas Studio to create 3D avatars, for which they have been recording their movements for five weeks using motion capture technology and under the guidance of Wayne McGregor, Covent Garden’s in-house choreographer. These avatars will be accompanied by ten live musicians in the ABBA Voyage show. Here, in the flamboyant marketing around all these modern technological wonders, the group can – albeit with reservations – be recognized as revolutionaries.

And the album “Voyage” itself listens as if created by a neural network, into which the entire catalog of the band was downloaded and tasked to create the best Christmas album ever. Let’s not forget that the disc was released at the perfect time for sales – Christmas shopping boom eve.

And there’s no doubt that the physical media with the album will sell just as well as its digital copies.

There are at least two impeccable Christmas tracks on “Voyage.” “Little Things” is a very traditional sentimental tune for a holiday soundtrack, fundamentally different from the brilliant and very sad in content “Happy New Year.” It is easy to believe that “Little Things” was composed by an “ABBA machine”, and only Annie-Fried Lingstad’s voice, in which the singer’s age is clearly audible, tells us that the song was created by real people.

“Little Things” could have been the last song on the album, not the third one (which is uncharacteristic for a Christmas song), leaving the listener on a wave of light euphoria. But the finale of “Voyage” is different: it’s the song “Ode to Freedom,” based on a waltz by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky from Swan Lake. The lofty tone of the finale contrasts with the lyrics about the impossibility of writing a true “ode to freedom.” ABBA’s freedom is the freedom to write “irrationally perfect” songs, the freedom to live outside the modern music industry, the freedom not to replicate their own discoveries for decades. But the very fact of the release of the album “Voyage”, as it turned out, contradicts this freedom.