Pingu
Noot noot
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2009
- Messages
- 12,602
Another one tonight! I hope you’ll join for what is absolutely a defining album in the group’s history.
Tonight's sync listen (or out-of-sync listen if you're @Jark) is...
RING RING!
Yes it's finally time. We’re listening to ABBA’s debut album tonight, although they weren’t even really ABBA at this point. The four members were still juggling their own careers and were very much tentatively experimenting with the idea of being a pop group at this point.
It certainly shows in the music, with only the title track really giving much of a hint towards what they would become, with the rest of it demonstrating the group at a very embryonic stage: The Bjorn/Benny division of songwriting labour wasn’t well-defined yet, they didn’t have their regular sound engineer who helped craft “the ABBA sound” yet bar a handful of tracks, the vocals are distributed evenly between the boys and the girls, and they weren’t even called ABBA until months after the album’s release.
I’ve been looking forward to this one – it’s ABBA, but it isn’t ABBA, and although it’s patchy (and pre-warning, boy is it patchy), I’ve always found this album a charming little curio in their back catalogue.
I hope you’ll join me in revisiting it, or visiting for the first time. We’re doing the original 12-track album and the two English-language B-sides, Merry-Go-Round and Santa Rose.
Playlist below, hit play at 7!
Tonight's sync listen (or out-of-sync listen if you're @Jark) is...
RING RING!
Yes it's finally time. We’re listening to ABBA’s debut album tonight, although they weren’t even really ABBA at this point. The four members were still juggling their own careers and were very much tentatively experimenting with the idea of being a pop group at this point.
It certainly shows in the music, with only the title track really giving much of a hint towards what they would become, with the rest of it demonstrating the group at a very embryonic stage: The Bjorn/Benny division of songwriting labour wasn’t well-defined yet, they didn’t have their regular sound engineer who helped craft “the ABBA sound” yet bar a handful of tracks, the vocals are distributed evenly between the boys and the girls, and they weren’t even called ABBA until months after the album’s release.
I’ve been looking forward to this one – it’s ABBA, but it isn’t ABBA, and although it’s patchy (and pre-warning, boy is it patchy), I’ve always found this album a charming little curio in their back catalogue.
I hope you’ll join me in revisiting it, or visiting for the first time. We’re doing the original 12-track album and the two English-language B-sides, Merry-Go-Round and Santa Rose.
Playlist below, hit play at 7!
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