Gold [VINYL]

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When Anderson’s Polar Music Group (and, consequently, ABBA’s songs and masters) were acquired by Polygram (now part of Universal Music Group) in 1989, the label had to wait for Polar’s patchwork of licensing deals to expire before devising a coherent strategy with which to approach ABBA’s library of hits. The children who grew up with ABBA omnipresent on the radio were maturing into punk, rap, and new wave; the adults who enjoyed their lighthearted, melodic hits were less interested in minimally arranged character studies.

The Visitors was their least successful album since the beginning of their career, and the band’s generation-spanning core audience was starting to wander into new spaces. Many in the music business raised their eyebrows when Stig signed with different record companies all over the world, instead of letting one major label handle the group globally,” wrote Carl Magnus Palm in his essential ABBA biography Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA. For the 30th anniversary ABBA are reissuing the album as a 2LP gold-coloured vinyl package, which is something they’ve done before, so not overly exciting.Robyn became one of this decade’s great pop heroes by pinning down this same sad-ecstatic balance and welding it to modern, muscular production. Money, Money, Money” is the most successful of Ulvaeus and Andersson’s early forays into musical theater, a gold-digging fantasy that’s given real edge through Lyngstad’s dramatic interpretation. The full catalogs of almost every artist popular enough to merit such a collection are available through any streaming service, organized by algorithms, and easily sorted by play count, which means labels have little reason to waste time and energy on a task the machines have already mastered.

In a 1993 essay in TIME after Gold’s American release, critic Richard Lacayo wrote that the band “was always easy to enjoy, if you could just put aside the unnerving sense that they were hastening the decline of pop music into commercial calculation and mindless buoyancy. Little more than a decade separated Gold’s release from the unceremonious end of the band’s recording career. Erlewine wrote that greatest hits have a way of “sand[ing] away the artists’ quirks,” and the same is true for Gold. But the level of quality represented on Gold sprung from more than just studio scheming or bald ambition. Although PolyGram had made all of the original studio albums available (along with the 1986 live album which had originally been issued by Polydor worldwide), all previously released ABBA compilations had been deleted.As these licences were renewed every three years, between 1989 (when PolyGram acquired Polar) and 1992 all of these licences had expired. You get overcharged 3 times with this one comparing to best true analog vinyl audiophile experience. Plans for a box set were pared back to a single disc, a conservative play intended to gauge the market for the band’s catalog before investing any more resources. Ulvaeus and Andersson grew up on traditional Swedish folk music and schlager music, a sappy, simple strain of pop with a distinctly continental European flair.