The Impossible Dream
This is where the story ends. This is goodbye. By Jim Irvin.
Abba ★★★ Voyage UNIVERSAL. CD/DL/LP
THEY SAY THEY never said never, but they may as well have. It was reasonably assumed that something like this would never happen. But having happened, what did they use the occasion to do? Reassert their majesty? Rewrite history? Act like 40 years hadn’t passed? Well, no, no and no.
Voyage is a carefully measured, somewhat downbeat final word. A dignified line drawn under a unique saga, one of the more extraordinary in pop history. The story ends, it turns out, with neither bang nor whimper, but with a wistful, mature summation, as four people in their seventies say goodbye to their pop lives with affection, skill and a particular melancholy that one doesn’t hear too often.
You’ll probably wish Voyage was stronger. But it might have been weaker. Though, as Björn and Benny have said in interviews, if it didn’t work at all there was no reason to release it. Completed after the forthcoming stage show had been greenlit – the recent singles date back to 2018 – it didn’t need to function as souvenir soundtrack for the youthful Abbatars that front the stage experience. (I wouldn’t be surprised if that were still to come.) Instead, Björn and Benny wrote songs that resonate with them now – as grandparents, older and wiser souls with a deep pool of memories – using stylistic flourishes that echo their youthful selves.
Some echoes are explicit: child-of-divorce saga Keep An Eye On Dan ends with a little quotation from SOS; Fernando’s Peruvian flutes open eco-hymn Bumblebee. Some echoes are less obvious: the Celtic flavour of Arrival permeates When You Danced With Me. Back in the day, they used George McCrae and Chic as guides. That, or its equivalent, hasn’t happened here. Here is Abba at their most folksy, hymnal and classical. I Still Have Faith In You will one day be a hit for a choir of fisherman’s wives, or something, mark my words. Björn and Benny have described their stance writing these songs as “absolutely trend-blind”. They’ve spent the last four decades involved in musical theatre, and it shows. These songs are, mostly, stagey and conservative.
They also lean quite heavily on the sentimentality lever. Little Things, a song for parents on Christmas morning, complete with a chunk of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, may be the most saccharine thing they’ve ever recorded. You’ve really got to be in the mood for syrup that runs this deep. And countryflavoured weepie I Can Be That Woman, in which an unravelling couple fight in front of their dog (“She jerks every time you swear”), is, let’s say, no Winner Takes It All. In contrast, the closing Ode To Freedom judges its sentimentality perfectly, remaining stately and subdued.
Agnetha and Frida are in great shape vocally, and it’s thrilling to hear them combine once more, though they can’t hope to sparkle in exactly the same, uncanny way they once did. I missed the late Ola Brunkert’s beautifully buoyant but anchored drumming, which provided so much sway, lift and punch. And these mixes seem to lack the clarity and perfection Abba are famed for. For example, the two rockers, Just A Notion and No Doubt About It, seem to swim with sonic information.
But, whatever. While there’s nothing here that immediately screams to be considered in the front rank of their output, the more you listen, the more it feels like being reunited with some long-lost, missingpresumed-dead relatives. Invoking a similar kind of recognition tinged with bewilderment – on both sides.
Undoubtedly the work of four masters who have always spent considerable time perfecting their work, but whose heads have not been tuned to the hum of pop music for a very long time, is just as good as you might expect.
Various
★★★★
The French Dispatch OST ABKCO. CD/DL/LP
Gallic styles old and new for the new Wes Anderson communiqué.
THE NEW film from the button-down master of deliberate design is a portmanteau of tales centred around a fictitious expatriate magazine operating out of a fictional French city, Ennui-surBlasé. Soundtracking these tales is a delicate original score of light guitar and piano dances composed by longtime Wes Anderson collaborator Alexandre Desplat. Interspersed between these numbers are perfect pieces of old pop (Charles Aznavour, Grace Jones, The Swingle Singers) selected by Anderson’s DJ-amanuensis, Randall Poster. There is also an endearingly awkward cover of Christophe’s dramatic 1966 weepie Aline, performed by Jarvis Cocker. Expanding on that aesthetic, Cocker has released an entire album of French pop, Chansons
d’Ennui Tip-Top in which he tackles songs by Françoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot and Jacques Dutronc with a daring disregard for the charm and craft of the originals. Hearing Laetitia Sadier duet with Cocker on a brace of tracks hints at what could have been.
★★★★
Fleuves De L’Âme PHANTASY SOUND. CD/DL/LP
Modernity and trad folk intermesh on Tunisian percussionist’s swirling debut.
THE LONG-GESTATING results of a nine-year collaboration with The Knife’s Olof Dreijer (that took in 2015 live shows as Hiya wal Âalam),
Fleuves De L’Âme finds percussionist, composer and academic Houeida
Hedfi putting her discrete spin on the spiritual trance of stambeli. Melodically rich highlights such as Souffles Du Nil, Appel
Du Danube and the three-movement Envol
Du Mékong (all titled after great winding rivers) rest heavily on Jalal Nader’s resonant bouzouk refrains and Radhi Chaouali’s lucid strings, as contrapuntal pianos and fragmented vocals add generous hints of menace. Hedfi’s richest percussive textures dominate Echos De Medjerda – a play-off against Dreijer’s deep, throaty recorder
– and 18-minute Cheminement Du Tigre, an experimental tour de force that flirts shamelessly with free jazz. It’s a fitting zenith to a beguiling outing, cinematic in scope and ambition.