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Starts off nice and cool, with their biggest local hit, which is the title track, of course. It's an upbeat generic pop song with a nice chorus that later developed into 'Mamma Mia', on a more complex and elaborate level. It's thoroughly enjoyable, anyway, and fully deserved to be a hit which it sadly wasn't. But that's really the only good thing that can be said about this record. Either ABBA were still not quite ready for prime time, or Bjorn and Benny weren't yet really trying to find their own niche in world music, but for the most part, the material selection is fairly primitive and second-rate. Most of the space here is filled up by bland bubble-gum commercial ditties, most of them probably rip-offs of local Swedish bands and suchlike crap. Of course, one could go ahead and say that ABBA never wrote anything but bland bubble-gum commercial ditties; but that would be seriously simplifying the picture. It is indeed quite telling that the record seems highly controversial to me - on one hand, the boys are clearly running all over the place in search of a style; on the other hand, they are so careless about the actual chords and note sequences that most of the rhythms and melodies appear to be fairly pedestrian, monotonous and unexciting. Moreover, at this point they hadn't even developed their vocal image: about half of this stuff is sung by Bjorn, and let me tell you I'm really not a fan of his singing talent (in fact, I must confess I don't like him at all - both visually and aurally. Benny's a much nicer type, even if there's no denying Bjorn's talents).Read full review
a cd for quiet evenings by the fireside,like a bedtime story for grown ups simply beautiful ,gruff rhys has perfected the song writers craft and like a good chablis just seems to improve with age