This is an album that has a long personal history
for me. Firstly, I am a child of the 80s who can remember the 70s
turning into a big new number. Which means I'm not intimidated or dazed
by 80s production values, synths and pompous drum sounds, or the odd
spot of chintzy disco. My first record, for reference, was a cheesy
disco compilation. Also, my father worked in the Persian Gulf in the
late 70s and brought back an impressive stack of bootleg cassettes of
everything that was on the charts then. A lot of it in questionable
taste, of course, and I'm sure in retrospect he bought so many Abba and
BoneyM and Kenny Rogers tapes only because they were so very
cheap. But these tapes were my first big musical experience, and I sat
around for hours tucking into catchy melodies and dancy beats and even
DJing my own compilations. I was also inadvertently picking up a lot of
English, as I discovered a year or two later (having moved to Australia
from Holland) and finding I could recite lyrics from memory and with
sudden, uncanny understanding.
After a huge number of relocations, I've now taken
the best pickings from the bootleg stash, and keep them for mild
nostalgia and occasional archival reference. Their sound quality is far
from great and the track order often meddled with — sometimes you can
hear the needle drop on the source record; but it was a great way to be
introduced to a variety of music. The experience of music is different
(compared to radio) when you can listen to things over and over
again, to really let it sink into the gray matter. Music then becomes a
part of time and memory, coded in the layering of matter in the brain.
You tune into the feel and fibre of music more.
Now that Abba have gone through their revival and
re-acceptance phases, it's pretty safe to come out and say one loves
their superb melodies and crafted records again, and not be lamely
ironic or kitschily camp in saying so. And now that my musical obsession
has, er, matured somewhat, I've come to The Visitors with wildly impressed ears.
I have a theory that disco can reach high art at times, but that'll have to wait because this isn't a disco album the way Voulez-Vous was. The Visitors
is nonetheless riddled with fine melodies and studio power. Damn if
it's not their most mature album musically, bristling with ideas and
production savvy — from the resonance of disco mixing right down to the
oompa coda of "Two For The Price of One". The musical changes and
progressions alone lift what in other hands would've been an unhappy
record, into high contagion of freshness and musical optimism.
Everything is proportionate and in service to the song: canny lyrics
sung with Nordic inflection; tricky backing vocals arranged with magic
variation; boppy and precise studio playing all round. It's all art.
The album's sound is explicitly reminiscent of the
early 80s — that is, digitally recorded — crisp, hermetically sealed
and clean music, cool to the ears and yet engaging. {Aside: for
contrast, listen to the tinny sound of the extra tracks tacked onto the
CD release. They're wholly second-rate, token song-by-numbers, and
illustrative of the soulless end of the digital recording spectrum.}
It's the kind of music my folks would find affable and hummable if they
wanted to be with it, contemporary, in 1982;
something to nestle in amongst their James Last and Nana Mouskouri
albums. Something pre-empting their middle-age divorces.
But in terms of writing craft and technical studio
perfection, all I can say about these Swedes is: Damn, they make one
with musical aspirations jealous; they had such a good thing going on.
They laid down clear lessons in songwriting and chorus construction and
melodic hooks and big-ass walls of pop sound. Big-ass catchy walls of sound, mind you — maybe not as heavy-weight as Arrival, perhaps, but still full and balanced. And with The Visitors they lay on a mature wisdom-post-pain nuance that I {now} find very endearing.
But first, I guess we should consider the final or divorce-album angle. Despite the couples having broken up by this stage of Abba's history, I don't think The Visitors was a clear-cut, last-dash effort at unity or the overt swansong statement in the way Abbey Road
was. I think they were happy to keep riding the popular Abba
juggernaut, happy to look for new themes and approaches to work on.
There's still a strong sense of Benny & Bjorn being in full production control, of carrying on with the established Abba formula and integrating what may.
From the start of Abba, Benny & Bjorn used
Agnetha and Frida for their vocal talents in a way that's reminiscent of
session singers and Spector. In discovering the power and success of
the vocal pairing, in developing their harmonic sound as they honed
their writing and production skills, there's a growing sense of mutual
utility in the band-talent concept. When you look at how adept their
promotional work was (the film clips & movie, the media spots, the
garish clothing and ultimately — crucially — writing some really
significantly personal relationship songs), there's a nagging sense they
exploited their own dramas for pop material as well. The songs worked,
everyone knew they were couples, and it was all within the Abba-theme
scope. So when the divorces came around, why shouldn't B&B write
about the experience. Look at the clips for "One of Us" and "The Winner
Takes it All" (off Super Trouper) — they're
taking their audience/fans along for the emotional ride. Sure, divorce
is something of an exploitable pop tradition I hear you say — from
Marvin Gaye to so much Phil Collins. Records can be vehicles of spite and hurt.
But there's a brazen honesty here that speaks to
people in a way Elvis' kitsch divorce anthems do not. Consider the
couple of "When All is Said and Done" at their last dinner together and
summing up their time together:
Here's to us, one more toast and then we'll pay the bill
Deep inside both of us can feel the autumn chill...
In our lives we have walked some strange and lonely treks
Slightly worn but dignified and not too old for sex.
There's a candour in maturity here, a certain
brass-tacks nerve. This is the music inspired by not one but a double
divorce, from within the production core of the band. With so many
painful ripples in the band, it's amazing The Visitors
finished up so well. They were willing to keep working within the
framework, possessed of a cool (as in calmly detached and unperturbed,
withholding of the heart's passion) and clinical Scandinavian approach
to work. A surprisingly honest and direct approach. With discernable
traces of broken hearts and cracked emotions below the surface, perhaps;
a bitter malevolence waiting to erupt for sure. But with the
understanding that the band (or what we'd now call The Brand) was bigger
than the sum of its relationship problems, the golden goose in the
room.
B&B made the tracks and worked out most of the
lyrical concept, and Agnetha & Frida would come in later and cut
their vocals in parts or together. There's no sense of mild distancing
you might hear when a singer forcibly sings another's songs — the songs
are all intimate and sufficient, workable and dealing
with it. Imagine being Agnetha or Frida and having to sing (with
conviction, and as a duo) these songs about (their) divorce(s) written
from the men's POV; or the little manoeuvring
games played in the Polar Studio control room over the mix ('Sing it
like this; and don't sing there, not like that'); or that oddly aching
lyric which you know was planted out of spite ('feeling stupid, feeling
small, wishing she had never left at all'). OK —
this is an extrapolation that may be wildly unrepresentative of the
actual sessions as they happened; but there's such a Nordic sense of
professionalism and control about it all, a willingness to resolve
without too much hysterical drama or fuss, to remain clinically amicable
to each and all. And then, within the inflection, you can limn the
cracks and the scars that speak of the hurt. The brave voice that sings
the lines back with assurance. The guys might've written it, but it's
the singer who owns the song.
As a finished, glossy package, The Visitors is far removed from the harrowing hurt of something like Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage,
where cold analysis and emotional betrayal are up for terse display and
drama. But there's a similar strain of a writer/director's personal
comment and a painfully public exploration of the inner, private
workings of relationship(s); the separation context that informs it.
As divorce music, music for those in a depressed
funk weeping copiously with gnawing pains in the heart, or for those
experiencing sudden solitude where there had recently been family and
companionship and the 'wonderful adventure', The Visitors is pretty affecting stuff.
One of us is crying, one of us is lying in her lonely bed...
One of us is only waiting for a call.
— interwoven with cool synths, accordion and
reverbed mandolin (ugh, the smattering of adult-oriented pop) — this is
fundamentally music of the heart. And as such it is marked by human contradictions: happy and sadly troubled; determined and also strangely listless.
However — it must be emphasised that only three or
four of the songs are explicitly about divorce, or moving on from
broken relations. The other songs offer varying shades of grey autumnal
feel (keywords: autumn chill, dark clouds hide the sun, this cold
December, winter night, long awaited darkness etc); there's late night
loneliness ("Like an Angel Passing Through My Room"); Cold War paranoia
("The Visitors"); the passing of a daughter's childhood ("Slipping
Through My Fingers"). "Slipping" especially goes
for the heart — if seen from a custodianship angle, the child going to
school in the morning but returning to an unmentioned father. Single
parenthood, shared but distant care, and time passing while one stares
away. It could also be less than all that, simply an oblique look at
personal ageing — regret and loss being common emotional tropes on the
album. This is the danger of interpretive perspectives in pop music
analysis: I could be way wide of the oblique
mark. The song is written about the daughter by the father, sung with
heart by the mother and really is the mother addressing herself; and so
the truth (if any — ultimately irrelevant) is reduced to the subjective
element of how it's sung, how the song is claimed and what's taken away
from it. It being written by the father would make it strangely
empathetic though; a layer of sensitivity below the emotional mess.
"Two for the Price of One" is another special
track. Bjorn takes the cheeky vocal about responding to personal ads
('The cries for help from different people, different ages'), and
there's a hellishly funky chorus with interlocking A&F backing —
that's one of the funkiest lines in their catalogue. The changes are
sculpted and dramatic in their contours — hope goes melodically up and
disappointment wanders down — and just when he reveals the third party
in an expected threesome is the mother-in-law, there's a beautiful oompa
coda which could only connote the marriage march and (now ironic)
bliss. It's oddly funny, like a mildly bitter in-joke given epic
treatment; the wry groom lamenting to his best man, realising what he's
gotten into. It's on par with McCartney in his medley phase, but with
more bite.
Throughout, synthesisers are given more
mix-prevalence than on previous Abba albums, but the operating principle
is always tasteful. In "Slipping", there's a
lead guitar solo doubled with synths, and in the second repetition the
guitar is mixed out to reveal the synths underneath before returning
with guitar — a very pleasing mix technique. Also on "Slipping" there's a
harmonic reversal of A&F's usual range-roles ('Sleep in our eyes,
her and me at the breakfast table...'), that creates a beautifully
sympathetic effect of young voices. It could also be dubbed by a single A
or F — I'm not sure. Of course every backing chorus arrangement is
perfect and complex; students of backing harmonies (and the power of the
mix) should take note.
"The Visitors" plays at Cold War persecution
anxiety with flanging dissonance and urgent drive (but from a Refusenik
angle). The (again) doubled synth and guitar solo is strangely
triumphant, a feel-good running with fist raised. "Soldiers" transforms
what could've been a dour song into a classically bright and jubilant
chorus. The rhythm section is so calmly authoritative — pure Abba-unity
and songwriting confidence; fully-fleshed backing vocals and clear,
engaging melodies. "Head Over Heels" plays a similar trick with its
chorus — follow all the melodies at work in it from its trippity-fragile
intro, and you'll feel the chorus lurching up out of nowhere, like an
unexpected key- and tempo-change. Track the held notes in the vocals; if
you looked at the music on paper you'd think it wouldn't make musical
sense. And I love that oblique line about the fashionable snob 'Pushing
through unknown jungles every day' — the girl who stomps her way through
relationships.
"I Let the Music Play" is a bit of an exception in
terms of form. By this stage Benny & Bjorn were moving toward
operatic show tunes and mini-musicals with stagey themes and big, big
choirs. I love listening B&B in interviews; I mean they were pretty
canny producers and craftsmen, but the casual ease with which they toss
off phrases like '... and behind all those vocal tracks you'd then layer
your *choirs*...' (asterisks mine) as though multitrack recording is
only fulfilled with massive choirs on every available track. Good old
success: throwing money and endless studio time at the Formula. And
again, the more remarkable that The Visitors sounds so clean and occasionally spare.
{A special mention should be made of Rutger
Gunnarsson, Abba's master bassist. In particular his work on "One of Us"
— all funky ghost notes and octaves played on a fretless bass, pushed
up in the mix with the drums. It's a step away from the wall of sound
perfected on Arrival, and it's very precise in
its crisp economy — but so damn appropriate! It's
touchstone-hallmark-yardstick bassplaying in total service to the song.
And that little bass glissando/burp dropped into the groove here and
there — very cool.}
With ample time-distance, I now find something sad
about top-flight songwriter & bands that have astounding success
and dizzying creative peaks (I mean the genuine artists, the ones that
really deliver the magic goods to match their popularity) and their
inevitable downward stroke or dissolution. I don't mean when the coke
and rehab divorces clear; I mean the indirect humanity that occasionally
shines thru the cracks with such affecting colour, like on this album.
When bands stop touring and focus on studio work,
especially the big-ass studio talents, their albums can become more
intimate, emotionally revealing, inward. The Visitors
is probably Abba's highest expression of emotive studio mastery, and it
definitely doesn't sound like it was tossed-off between tours. In terms
of song values and melodic craft, it's almost cloyingly mature, and yet
also saddening because these amazing melodies are devoted to breakups
and their typically adult aftermath. Not because these are melodies and
choruses I seem to have always known and hence regard timeless, but
because they are genuinely instructive of how good songs are put
together and arranged for dramatic effect. This is what's surprising
about The Visitors after all these years — the realisation that it's all incredibly good stuff, that it will carry on.
{At this stage of the article I'd like to remind readers that yes, we are indeed still talking about an Abba album.}
And with all these multivalent sadnesses at work:
the breakups and the vocals they inspire (vocals that cannot help
betraying their depth), the tension of beautiful melodies married to
dark or soul's-lonely-night themes, and the swansong of a band at its
last peak. Though it wasn't planned as the final release (and they did
more work together), it's still the most mature album they made in terms
of depth and craft.
And it's a dangerous album for depressive types —
it sucks you right in. Its moods are affecting, strong, but then Abba
know to layer it with pep and optimism; somehow their addressing the
emotions makes for a positive {and saddening} listening experience. You
can bracket unhappiness with uplifting melodies and create something
unique beyond the lyric content, beyond the obvious.
As a child I hadn't a single clue this was going
on — I was absorbing the music as music, not as content. But realising
the lyric details later and recognising I'd already absorbed some of the
colour and tone of adult maturity, that is a little strange.
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