When word spread across the internet about an upcoming new ABBA album, excitement burst from eager fans wanting to know when they would get their hands on the record, and where they could buy tickets for the tour the group would embark on to support it.
Then the pandemic hit, and everything went silent.
As 2020 slowly turned over to 2021, and people returned to normal lives, ABBA too came back to the forefront to ensure everyone they hadn't forgotten about their first studio album in forty years. It was still very much in the works, and coming soon.
Well today was that day, and so I'm diving head long into Voyage, ABBA's ninth studio album...and I'm probably not going to make any friends with this one.
The album breaks one of my biggest rules. It starts with a ballad, which also happens to be the teased single, I Still Have Faith In You. It's a decent song, but a show opener it is not. It causes the album to limp over the starting line, and this is not helped by the following track, When You Danced With Me, which is so short that it feels incomplete.
Things only get worse from there with the oddly placed Christmas song, Little Things. It derails an already faltering "Voyage", and makes one wonder just what these four masterminds of music were thinking.
While I wish I could say it gets better from there, the rest of the album goes on, seemingly trapped in the era ABBA once thrived in. I suppose it could be perceived as a good thing for familiarity, what it also shows is that the group hasn't developed at all beyond 1981's The Visitors. If anything, they seem to have forgotten how to craft hits in lieu of just writing songs. Forgettable songs at that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this album could have met the expectation of the hype. This is The Phantom Menace all over again. Where people will have their own vision, and it's just not going to get met. With that said, I'm also not saying this is a bad album. It's just not one which deemed them coming out of retirement for. The problem becomes that this isn't the 1982 follow up to The Visitors. This is the long awaited, "ABBA is coming back," album. And to that regard, it's just not special enough.
It almost begs the question of whether or not an entire album was the right course of action. Perhaps the impact would have been greater had the group delivered their two singles, and left the rest to fans rabid imaginations of what a full album could have been like.
Overall, I'm just not impressed. This isn't the album ABBA needed to make.
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