ABBA Arrival Poll & Appreciation Thread.

The problem with Abba was that they released their albums so close together, it was impossible to extract all the potential singles from each one. When I kissed the teacher on Arrival is a case in point. Arrival would probably have sold millions more had that been pulled as a single. I would even shelve Money money money as a single. Release WIKTT instead.

 

my sister had this album when i was a kid. i thought it was pretty good.
i was thinking about buying it recently and was surprised to see that the Australian release was the only original vinyl with fernando on it ... i see that it's now a bonus track ... but that's kind of bizarre to me because that was the song that really sold the album in oz

 

They added Fernando to the Greatest Hits (park bench cover) album here. This came out a few months before Arrival. They probably thought it would be cheeky to add it to that as well.

 

ahhh record company shenanigans is there anything like it? lol

 

UK sales of this album seem too low. Apparently approx 1.7 million to date. 10 weeks at number 1, 92 weeks on chart.

 

Love it, went in a lot of detail back on "The Album" thread about how this and GH were my first Abba albums and this was also my first Abba CD as well, both occurrences made me fall in love with the group. Once in 1977 the next time in the early 90s.

Love the intro of WIKTT, that guitar just rings so beautiful.
Always thought that the end of the album was a little low key with the instrumental at the end, I think Tiger might have been a better track to end the album with.

Love the cover, to the person above who didn't work out what they were sitting in, didn't the back cover give a hint?

 

That’s pretty good for the UK. Not many albums sell a million these days.

 

I could've picked half the tracks from the album, but If I had to pick only one from the album...
Why Did It Have To Be Me.

Darryl

 

I still have a huge soft spot for the Waterloo album. It was my first 8 track and first ABBA album that I found in a cut out bin for 99 cents in 77. I love everything on that album ... there is an innocence that is already fading by the next album and certainly gone by "Knowing Me Knowing You". In the early 9o's I was in a noisy band and we tried to cover "Watch Out" and maybe even played it out once or twice. We couldn't do it justice though. I really wanted to do "King Kong Song" but our first exploratory attempts were even more disheartening. I always loved how that song fades out to what is basically the riff from "Dancing Queen". I was about to list my other favorite ABBA albums until I realized I was listing almost all of them. But above all Arrival still remains tops for me!

 

The current unsurprising poll leaders Knowing Me Knowing You and Dancing Queen are my auto-include picks. I'll try to give the LP another spin before I vote though.

 

I didn’t hear the Waterloo album until 2002. For some reason I saw the remaster, along with the one of Ring Ring, and decided to finally get them both. Waterloo isn’t a bad album... Some silly-ish songs but the melodies, vocals and production are as fine as ever. Ring Ring and Waterloo are probably my least played ABBA albums, but I do play them.

 

Love it. Dum Dum Diddle and When I Kissed the Teacher should have been hits too. This and The Album are my two favs, with Take A Chance On Me my fav of their songs.

 

Waterloo has some fine tunes on it. Dance while the music is a favourite.

 

I also didn’t hear Waterloo until a couple of years ago, when I found an early CD in a thrift store.

Great track indeed, I already knew it from the Greatest Hits album. My Mama Said is my personal favourite. Funky ABBA!

 

Sorry straying way off topic (if I post again it will ARRIVE on point I promise!)

 

And Voulez-Vous sounds amazing!

 

Very fun album.

 

Agree with your whole post. I never liked the sound of any of their cds compared to the best vinyl versions. I have a feeling Arrival was recorded at different studios. I generally can't enjoy an album that I don't feel was recorded very well, and I don't feel Arrival was. However, I absolutely love this album despite some of the sq issues (and I totally agree with you...some of it is fine...Dancing Queen is fine for the type of song it is, despite it's boxy compressed sound, but clearly this was purposely done for AM radio).

I was listening to one of their comp albums today and Rock Me came on, a song I have always really enjoyed. It struck me how incredibly good they were. That song in the US was basically thrown out as the B side of, I believe, I Do I Do I Do. Many bands would die just to have one song that good, and these guys were writing so much quality material that they could relegate such a strong song to a B side. Maybe others feel I'm over estimating it, but I think it's a very fun and catchy song.

 

Voulez Vous is indeed very well recorded, thank goodness! I love cranking up Does Your Mother Know. Arrival is the only album in their entire catalogue that imo stumbled in consistency with sound quality. Even their first album sounds good. Michael Tretow should get an awful lot of credit (and the boys to acknowledge this as we know) for how they sounded. That is very difficult stuff blending all those vocals together like that, and on top of that they had an embarassment of riches with all the other elements added to the mix. Michael clearly spent an incredible amount of hours mixing those albums. I think Arrival may have been rushed, as he certainly knew how to do it right.

 

I wasn't sure if they had switched over yet by Arrival. If it's eight track, that completely explains the problems with Arrival. They then had to ping pong, as they call it, tracks and combine them onto one or two tracks to make room to record more. A clever trick, and we did this a lot in my studio, but for the kind of music they did that was a poor decision as my ears can certainly tell. Every time you do that you are essentially moving one generation away from the original. And it really shows. That's why it sounds shrill. And dull and lifeless on some songs. And why Money Money sounds really good in places. That's a pretty simple production that Michael probably was able to keep at eight tracks. All the other songs sound like they should have been done on a 24 track deck. I'm very curious how they pulled off such good sound earlier in their career? As I mentioned before, I suspect he had to use different facilities and didn't have access to what he had prior. I'm sure they pushed really hard after that to get their studio done, as they certainly deserved, and sorely needed, state of the art equipment. By Arrival, they had really outgrown whatever they were using. That is incredibly frustrating to band like that who are very creative in the studio, hitting walls due to limitations of the studio. They did very, very well with what they had. Of course, starting with Voulez Vous those limitations vanished.

 

You are being kind saying it didn't sound to good. I would say it was an absolute insult to bands that strived to record decent sounding albums. They had to cram 8 tracks on 1/4 inch tape, so you're already behind the proverbial eight ball. You have an 8 track player in a car that's shaking and bumping that, for the most part, were very cheaply made tape players, so the tape heads were almost always out of alignment so you would hear tracks from another song bleed into the song you actually wanted to hear. Which is why you would see people shoove match books under the cartridge, in an attempt to line the tape to the head. Throw in terrible inconsistent tape speed (wow and flutter), and a very limited frequency response on really crappy quality tape, and you have the makings of truly laughably bad sound quality. That certainly proves how so few people even care about sound quality. You apparently got to miss that era...lucky you! I didn't even mention the clunking sound when it would change tracks, quite often in the middle of the song!

 

If anyone started a thread about the biggest lost opportunity of not releasing a single, WIKTT would be my pick, and I agree that as a SINGLE it probably would have performed much better, though Money is an excellent album track. Money has some weird chords that aren't generally used in pop singles, so I find it quite an odd choice when there are so many other great songs. Maybe they were concerned about the lyrics? Money is certainly more interesting to hear the lyrics on imo. Who know! Somebody liked WIKTT...it was the lead off track after all! And perfect imo.

 

Camera Obscura is one of my favorite modern acts. But their no ABBA.

 

Arrival was recorded on 16 and 24 tracks. Dancing Queen started out on 16 track (as the only track AFAIR) and was later transferred to 24 tracks for more overdubs.
Interesting fact: on Tiger, 7 tracks are occupied by electric guitars.