I still have faith in you

  

OK - pay attention, because this is where it gets confusing!  I've caught up with the current week's chart, so I'm now going to start going backwards in time from where I started - let's see how far back we make it.  I will, of course, for maximum confusion also continue to move forwards in time as new charts appear.  Understood?

24/12/21 : Voyage - ABBA



It's always been easy to sneer at ABBA over the years, but I think everyone secretly has a favourite track of theirs ("The Day Before You Came" for me, because it's just weird!).  It's also difficult to fault Abba Gold for the overall quality level and I think this, somewhat unfairly, has labelled them as a singles band - but Arrival, Super Trouper and The Visitors are all fine albums as well.  However, did the world need a new ABBA album after all these years?

Well, for me, the answer is "no not really".  It's to their credit that it definitely sounds like an old-school ABBA album - they might have chased a more modern sound which really could have ended horribly.  And there is some almost classic ABBA on there - I think "I Still Have Faith In You" and "Don't Shut Me Down" would stand a chance of making it on to a "Best Of The Rest" album.  But the rest of the album is inessential at best and overly twee at worst ("Little Things" in particular is just nasty).  If you like ABBA then it's worth checking out, but I'm not convinced you'll be revisiting it all that often.  It's a nice looking album cover though!

In the week under consideration, this was #3 in the chart (Ed and Adele taking the top two spots) but it had made it to #1 (in the week of release, unsurprisingly) and hung around the top three until Xmas since which it has slid down the charts (#37 last week).  In other Abba chart related news,  Abba Gold has been in the charts for 1030 weeks (nearly 20 years!) in total - and amusingly was at #26 last week (and is currently on a consecutive run of 239 weeks).

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album, although I am intrigued as to how their virtual concert with digital "abbatars" is going to work out.  The album was reasonably well reviewed critically and did very well commercially - it would have been the biggest album of the year in the UK if it hadn't been for Ed and Adele popping up soon after to overtake it.

"Customers also listened to" a lot of other Abba albums, the Mamma Mia soundtrack (no surprises there) and the Johnny English soundtrack (which features "Does Your Mother Know?").  Overall, this was an interesting curiosity for me but not a lot more - I'll continue sticking Abba Gold on when I need my hit of Swedish pop goodness.

17/12/21 - Oh, how the mighty are fallen
31/12/21 - A little known artist

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