ABBA

The evening news, a segment on banks, the stock market, the lottery: the usual parade of vain hopes and dismal figures. The soundtrack saves the day: "Money, Money, Money", a classic and forever unavoidable. Sure, it's become a bit predictable by now, just like TV airing the musical "Mamma mia" for the umpteenth time in prime time, with Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried. Seen it a thousand times, but it's still a treat. And what about the earworm "Hung Up", released in 2005 and lodged at the top of the charts for months on end thanks to its neat sample of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)"?

It was 1982 when ABBA broke up, yet here we are in 2013 and their music is still everywhere. Love them or hate them, the Swedish quartet's songs have an immediacy and a clarity that make them the ultimate benchmark for pop pervasiveness. And they legitimately make their authors the most famous non-English-speaking band in history, even in the US and the UK.

Listen to the albums they recorded and you'll find surprises for every taste. But there's no getting around it: there's no single masterpiece; the tracklists swing between masterful hit singles and syrupy kitsch triumphs. Every fan's task would then be to assemble their own personal dream compilation, except it already exists: it's called "ABBA Gold", released in 1992 to mark the band's 10th anniversary since splitting up.

"ABBA Gold" runs to nineteen tracks, and among them are all those 5, 10, 15 unforgettable songs that, personal preferences aside, built the band's legend and keep it alive today.

The craftsmen of pop

The story of these four Swedish musicians, Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (A.B.B.A.), stands substantially apart from that of Anglo-American pop stars. While those acts were treading stages across half the world and taking turns on Top of the Pops, ABBA were cutting their teeth trying to win a slot at the Eurovision Song Contest, alongside the likes of Gigliola Cinquetti and Nicola di Bari.

They made it in 1974 with "Waterloo", which trounced the weak competition and catapulted them from Scandinavia to worldwide stardom. Taken from their second, self-titled album, the song is the first example of that special mastery of balance and dazzling colour, of pomp and essentiality, that would become the main hallmark of their style.

Born as an energetic slice of pop-rock seasoned with big guitars and rock'n'roll shadings, it was stripped down during production, reworked and dressed in shimmering disco garb finely tailored by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, the band's principal songwriters throughout their entire career and the key factotums behind every one of their records.

ABBA's take on the reigning disco sound is markedly different from the American models, yet just as catchy. In place of funky guitars, their embryonic Europop favours simple, bright acoustic chords; bass and drums take on a sturdiness far removed from the grooves of black music, and the melody itself forgoes any soul inflection in favour of a hook-laden appeal that, despite its glittering, carefree surface, seems to dig its roots straight into European folk tradition. Honky-tonk piano, free-wheeling saxophone and a touch of reinforcing synth round out the picture of the track that first introduced the world to the "ABBA sound".

Never a note out of place. That's the essential "recipe" behind all the global hits to come, from "Mamma Mia" (1975) to "Super Trouper" (1980). In the former, we find the same booming "piano and guitar" backbone of the previous year's single, but the arrangement is at once clearer and more intricate: on one hand, the piano is bolstered by the festive tone of the xylophone; on the other, the guitar riffs fade into the background, replaced by simple, flawless ascending and descending lines played on sustain. Fullness and emptiness, embellishments and string flourishes alternate throughout the track without ever stealing the scene from one another, or above all from the constant stream of melodic invention and tonal shifts that define the vocal theme.

"Super Trouper", five years on, updates the same formula to the sound of the band's later phase. With piano and guitar gone, the same game plan is now carried by swirling synthesizers, a bouncing line taking the place of the piano hammers' chime, and a hazy timbral bed merging what used to be the roles of strings and guitar. But it's not just the tone colour that has evolved: room has also been carved out in the arrangement for the bass, which becomes more dynamic and prominent; the drums, meanwhile, have taken on more overtly disco accents, capable of pushing the track onto dancefloors increasingly attuned to dance music.

But if one single track had to be chosen to symbolise the full craftsmanship of the Andersson/Ulvaeus duo, it would be "Money, Money, Money" (1976). Here we're firmly in the realm of pure pop classicism, on that thin thread linking Cole Porter to the Beatles to Burt Bacharach to Supertramp. The ingredients are the usual ones: piano and guitar, pop-rock melodies and a disco rhythmic drive. But the track's construction draws on the songwriting tradition of the early twentieth century, on the art of slowing down and speeding up, of enriched chords, of key changes. Onto this old-fashioned design, with lyrics and a vocal delivery that seem to evoke the Roaring Twenties, are grafted a bass line pulsing harder than ever, an impeccable interplay of cymbals and, above all, the finest realisation of that ascending/descending pattern that is the trademark of so many of the band's guitar lines. Cold, spare and cutting, the groove carved by Ulvaeus's Gibson almost seems to transpose the insights of his majesty Robert Fripp into a pop key. More than any other track on the compilation, "Money, Money, Money" is the flag-bearer of the elegance and leanness ABBA were capable of, without ever sacrificing versatility and shifting colour.

The lineup, the lyrics, the image

Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, just like Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, were couples in real life (at least until the late Seventies), but ABBA's image is inextricably tied to another kind of pairing: that between the two male musicians on one side and the two female singers on the other. More than any other pop band, ABBA managed to convey the feel of a team, made up of two "strikers" up front and two tightly bonded figures holding down the back line.

Even more than the videos, the album covers, the back-to-back live performances, or the frequent TV appearances, it was the music that made ABBA synonymous with this sense of unity. "We're not self-absorbed pop stars, but four ordinary people with ordinary problems, bound by the two most intense relationships in the world: friendship and love. Our life is your life, we're just like you": that is, ultimately, the message that quietly emerges from their songs.

Let's start with "Take A Chance On Me" (1978), the most obvious example. It only takes the first few notes to understand everything: Agnetha and Anni-Frid's voices merging into one, with Björn and Benny's arriving an instant later on the backing lines. The lyrics, in plain, unpretentious English, sketch the utterly ordinary story of a flirtation that went nowhere. No malice, no swagger: just hope, lightness and disappointment. Feelings and relationships, as in almost every one of their songs, are the true heart of the matter.

Yet while the words tell a first-person story, it's the "we" that echoes through the four voices. What comes across isn't loneliness, but the reassuring strength of "we're all in this together", the certainty that you can always count on friendship. Marvels of harmony and unison, transforming a tired, well-worn romantic failure into a "team spirit" that extends from the quartet to any community at all.

Even when they explicitly tackle a break-up, ABBA still manage the trick of asserting their ever-present sense of universal togetherness. Take "Knowing Me, Knowing You" (1976), where the outwardly intimate chorus "Knowing me, knowing you/ […] There is nothing we can do/ Breaking up is never easy, I know but I have to go" is actually the song's peak in terms of choral power. From the single-voice verse to the full-blown chorus quoted above, the whole song is a continuous crescendo of layered vocal lines, with the key moments underlined by well-judged stop-'n'-go instrumental breaks. Once again, a series of textbook devices, simple, never overdone and perfectly effective; all leading, at the end of the chorus, into an iconic instrumental section where even the guitar solo line is bolstered by an overdub arrangement of unexpected restraint.

The case of "Super Trouper" (1980), finally, is a special one. In a rare occurrence among the band's hits, the song deals with a theme that's strictly "popstar business": the stress of success. But—need it be said?—once again the tone is the ecumenical "we're all equal and all siblings", with the emphasis placed on those universally shared elements that stand out even in a context so far removed from most people's lives. Verses and chorus drift between depicting the world and the feelings of someone who "hopes every day this show's the last", and the search for that person (a lover? a friend? a relative? it's precisely the total vagueness of the reference that gives the image its universal charge) whose presence, hidden in the crowd, gives the strength to carry on. The bridge, meanwhile, tips entirely into everyday feeling, celebrating the moment of reunion as a cure for every worry. Even the theme furthest removed from "common feeling" is thus brought back into thoroughly "popular" dynamics.

All that glitters is not gold

ABBA's music rests on an extremely delicate balancing act. Between lightness and superficiality, between economy and ornament, between good taste and kitsch, between sentimentality and sugariness, between universality and populism.

Any song that moves through this territory, however skillfully constructed, will always be teetering on the edge, ready to plunge into an ocean of mawkishness. It takes almost nothing to tip it over: even just a different listener's perspective can prove fatal.

So even in the crème de la crème of ABBA's songbook, there will inevitably be a track or two that stirs up a certain sappiness. The most at risk, obviously, are the slow ones.

It's on the ballads, in fact—the less rhythmic songs, closer to lovey-dovey romance—that a band like ABBA faces its toughest challenge. Less freedom to work with interlocking parts and structures, less room to balance a slightly mannered tone with the rhythmic flair of bass and drums. And the obvious need to rely, always and inevitably, on the same two singers, even though their register intrinsically tends to tip into the saccharine.

Against this backdrop, a song like "The Winner Takes It All" (1980) should already seem miraculous. Just acoustic guitar keeping time, lyrics front and centre, and a memorable piano theme emerging little by little: for the whole first verse, the song rests on almost nothing. As it develops, elements are added—bass and drums first, then strings and backing vocals—but without altering the opening's mood, at once epic and intimate. Despite the usual "plural" vocation, the vocal manages to stay intimate and heartfelt, projecting onto the listener the sense of moved resignation expressed by the lyrics.

This song brings out an aspect of ABBA's music that's anything but minor: seemingly frivolous and carefree, it actually conceals a melancholy soul. While in the more uptempo numbers it stays in the background, it inevitably comes to light whenever the tempo slows down. "S.O.S." (1975)—albeit somewhat overshadowed by a rather middling folk-pop pre-chorus—clearly reveals the band's more downcast side, both in the languid verse and in the more sparkling chorus, thanks partly to a clever "prog" use of the keyboards.

The pseudo-Chilean "Fernando" (1976), on the other hand, best represents the worst of the album and of the "ABBA style". Despite some brilliant touches in the melody's construction (with lines of varying metre that hypnotise the listener) and various structural devices that would go on to inspire musicologist Philip Tagg's monumental semiological analysis, the song lands squarely in the realm of the most irritating pop tat. Ethnic timbres by the pound, pan flutes galore, and the sudden intrusion of a deplorable folksy chorus—complete with a village-fair "oompah" bass—make the class of songs like "Dancing Queen", "Does Your Mother Know" and "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" seem like a mirage.

Things don't improve with the Spanish-flavoured "Chiquitita" (a name that's a statement of intent in terms of soppiness) or the near-nursery-rhyme "Thank You For The Music", but ultimately it's right that they're part of this collection: you can't claim to appreciate ABBA without having also reckoned with their more saccharine side. Although, perhaps, songs like "When All Is Said And Done", "Our Last Summer" or "Angel Eyes"—included instead on the later compilation "More Gold", which, at this point, you're obliged to listen to—would have been a better fit to represent it.

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12/05/2013