Benny and his Orkester make their first travels outside their native land…
[Video][Website]
[5.13]
Colin Cooper: There was an item on the news the other night about a documentary NASA commissioned about the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The director of the film, Theo Kamecke, was told by NASA to “make a good film”, but to do it in the knowledge that by the time it had been completed, the public would have lost interest. He said he’d been told that his motivation for making the piece should be people watching it far in the future, and – forty years on – it’s been discovered and remastered, and will finally see the light of day. In other news, Benny from ABBA thinks he’s still in ABBA. And he’s still sporting the most hair on a person ever.
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Chuck Eddy: Suppose this isn’t that far from genius desolate-afternoon Abba ski-lodge ballads like say “The Day Before You Came,” and it does fit a couple details in (the bus, the house by the lake). But even Abba’s schmaltz seemed written for the radio, not for some bad stage musical.
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Anthony Miccio: Cynics may say it sounds like ABBA but slower, but they’re missing the guitar and synth flash that bring Benny’s signature sound blazing into the late eighties. And ABBA was plenty slow in the first place.
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Edward Okulicz: Ties up the loose ends of ABBA’s influence – part musical, part reinvigorated schlager, part frail, spare ballad – and does so very nicely.
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W.B. Swygart: Part of me wants this blurb to just be a series of sentences beginning “So old school, it’s…” (e.g. “taking the 11-plus”, “running cross-country in its underwear”, “caning boys for discussing evolution”), but that’d just be a really roundabout way of saying that no-one, with the possible exception of Bryan Adams and the members of Modern Talking, has felt the need to make their guitars sound like this since maybe 1988. At a push. And yet I’m miming along to this chorus. In an office. With people in it. None of whom can hear this at the moment. And in my head, I see the Snorkmaiden hoisted proudly aloft in the scoop of a JCB, rolling slowly through fields as The Kids From The Ricola Advert line the path, bellowing the chorus for all they’re worth with grins like Romanian gymnasts. And then I notice that no proper video’s been made for this yet. Swedish video-making dudes: my email’s top left corner. Holla på din pojke.
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Dan MacRae: It appears Benny Andersson has been possessed by the spirit of Jim Steinman. There was a time when that combination could have been beautiful, but the current result seems to the most bombastic wedding march imaginable.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Is this the place I admit to listening to Madonna’s soundtrack to Evita, and talk about how her version of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” makes Patti Lupone just crawl up and die — or, by extension, how technically inept singers who attempt work beyond them often compenensate by ratcheting up the emotional factor in really interesting ways (c.f. Elaine Stritch and Sondheim)?
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Ian Mathers: Either ABBA really was more than the sum of its parts, or Benny is just getting mawkish in his old age, because this is overripe cheese. I think the problem is that Andersson started writing musicals like Chess, and he still seems to think that turning pop songs into clips from a neverending soap opera is a good idea. This still earns a few points because dude is still a pretty good melodic craftsman, but someone get him a good editor NOW.
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