Anything said about A won’t affect its sales. Guaranteed to sell millions, it’s the first album from ABBA’s former singer since 2004’s all-covers set, My Colouring Book. It’s also the first to contain original material since the one which preceded that, 1987’s I Stand Alone. In keeping with the privacy with which she leads her life, she’s not prolific. Fältskog’s return is newsworthy and welcome, so it’s deeply depressing that A is so feeble. Worse than that, her personality is hardly evident.
Can the lyrics to "Perfume in the Breeze" (“I’m not sure what happened, it happened so fast/ people say love like this can never last/ what a night, what a night, what a night, I’m still not all right/ you vanished like a rainbow from the horizon of my heart”) really be what an artist of Fältskog’s status ought to be singing? Then there’s “I trusted you, my faith was blind” (“I Was a Flower”). Such triteness extends to the music, cotton-wool cloaked Nineties-style fluff with forgettable melodies which might have suited a second-tier Eurovision entry or any number of TV talent show winners. Bringing in Gary Barlow to duet with her on “I Should’ve Followed you Home” doesn’t lift proceedings. “I should have followed you home,” he sings repeatedly, then declares it's “so familiar and so right”. The same can't be said for her voice, which is mostly buried by copious multi-tracking or is autotuned beyond recognition. The best that can be said for this album is that her familiar yearning tone, thankfully, surfaces now and then (on, say, “Past Forever”) and that the upbeat and vaguely ABBA-esque “Dance Your Pain Away” alleviates the lugubrious mood.
The person responsible is Jörgen Elofsson, who produced and wrote or co-wrote all of A. He has previously written for Westlife, Shayne Ward, Kelly Clarkson and Leona Lewis. The release comes a week after the long-delayed opening of Stockholm’s ABBA museum, which can't be coincidence. Reminders of Fältskog’s past hang heavy. Obviously, she can’t be who she was, and there's no reason she should try to be. But with the generic and vacuous A, it’s sadly not possible to hear who she is now.
Watch Agnetha Fältskog discuss A on Swedish TV alongside Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen