The problem with singing the songs of the Swedish pop group
ABBA skillfully is that they weren't particularly meant to be sung that way. The virtue of the group's two female vocalists lay in the way they blended themselves into the overall texture of a song, including especially its electronic conception, rather than in traditional expressiveness. The woman singing in an
ABBA song is, implicitly or explicitly, Everywoman, and it's no accident that the two bookends of
ABBA's careers recorded here, the pre-
ABBA "I Am Just a Girl" and one of the very last two
ABBA songs, "The Day Before You Came," both treat the theme of an ordinary woman leading an utterly ordinary life that is suddenly redeemed by romantic love. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were studio vocalists, subsidiary to a production conception like other singers of the disco era in which they mostly worked. Mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is certainly to be commended for her unusually adventurous forays into the pop realm, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that she strikes a glancing blow off
ABBA's music rather than connecting with it head on.