ABBA - Arrival (1976)

Yay! More ABBA! And I'm pretty sure this album has a song that I know, as opposed to The Visitors, which somehow is a memorable ABBA album with zero memorable songs.

I like complaining about an album that leads off with a group's biggest hit, which would be the case if Arrival had started out with "Dancing Queen". Instead Arrival begins with the charming "When I Kissed The Teacher". Earlier this morning on Facebook I shared a link to an article that noted an overlap between supposedly "cool" high school teachers and teachers that wound up having relationships with their students. That's all I can think of while listening to this ABBA song. Interestingly from what I can see through my Amazon Prime account the song has never been downloaded, or at least is not very popular, so maybe ABBA's fanbase, which I'm guessing skews heavily female, is a bit skeeved out as well.

Anyhoo, "Dancing Queen" is oddly batting second in the lineup on this album. It's a weird place for a megahit, and leads me to believe that maybe ABBA didn't expect this song to be that great. Judging by "When I Kissed The Teacher" I'm not sure what ABBA considers a hit song if "Dancing Queen" isn't. That's not to mean I think "Dancing Queen" is a great song- I don't. But any moron would recognize it as a stereotypical "hit song".

Ugh... the synthesizers on this album just sound awful. I wonder what ABBA would have sounded like in an earlier era, because they can write a decent melody, and an arrangement where they were forced to use something other than a cheesy 1976 synthesizer might sound cool. Maybe if they used a melotron or clavinet, or used horns and strings. If Arrival were produced with modern synthesizers I'd probably hate it more, because it would lose it's cheesy appeal.

There is one song on Arrival with very little synth and a few real instruments, the honky-tonk hoe-down "Why Did It Have To Be Me?" The style is so out there compared to the other tracks on this record and I enjoyed it a bit more, but it still has a weird tinny digital sheen to it.

The Amazon Prime version of this album also includes an ABBA song I kinda like... "Fernando". It's just as stupid and ridiculous and synth-laden as the other ABBA songs I've heard, but the song has a kitschy faux-epicness that I find charming. But I can't credit the studio version of Arrival with giving us "Fernando". It was originally released as a non-album single a few months before Arrival, and while it did appear on the South African, Australian, and New Zealand versions of the album, the band seems to prefer the Arrival that was released in the rest of the world as the "original" so I defer to their judgment.

Not that it matters. I like this contemporary review snippet from Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone: "Muzak mesmerizing in its modality." That's about how I feel too. Any 30-second chunk of Arrival could be played on loop in an elevator and it would work perfectly. 2 stars.