Abba Voulez Vous

Commercially, Super Trouper, ABBA's seventh album, was another worldwide blockbuster. "The Winner Takes It All," its lead-off single, released several months in advance of the album in most territories, was a smash; for example, it was the group's 14th consecutive Top Five hit in the U.K. and their eighth number one there. The title track was also a British chart-topper (their last), as was the album, their sixth. "Lay All Your Love on Me" made the U.K. Top Ten, and "On and on and On" was released as a single in some countries, hitting the Top Ten in Australia. (Typically, American success was more modest, though the album went gold, and "The Winner Takes It All" was a number one adult contemporary and Top Ten pop hit.) Musically, Super Trouper found ABBA, always trend-conscious, taking account of the passing of disco and returning to the pop/rock sound typical of their early albums…

Waterloo, Dancing Queen or Voulez-vous. Famous, perhaps even played a bit too frequently. But what about Waterloo as a jazz ballad or Money, Money, Money in swing?

The titles of hits compilations always deal in superlatives: "Greatest," "Best," "Very Best" – but the compilers of this ABBA collection have a special problem justifying the release of yet another such album after the multi-platinum success of 1992's ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits and its 1993 follow-up, More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits. (Indeed, the band was never shy about repackaging, issuing a Greatest Hits LP in 1976 as only its third U.S. album, followed by Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 in 1979 and The Singles [The First Ten Years] in 1982.) They have settled on The Definitive Collection and done their best to live up to the name. The 37-track double CD contains "for the first time exclusively collected in one package, each and every single as conceived and released by ABBA and their record company Polar Music between 1972 and 1982," writes annotator Carl Magnus Palm.

In the '70s and early '80s, ABBA was one of the groups that most rock critics loved to hate. How could ABBA's bubblegum Europop be so huge, critics wondered, at a time when challenging visionaries like Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Lou Reed were making records? But music doesn't always have to be challenging, daring or provocative - it can simply entertain as long as it's well done - and time has been much kinder to the Swedish outfit than those '70s critics. Long after ABBA's 1983 breakup, their recordings continue to sell - and in the '90s and 2000s, ABBA covers have come from some unlikely places (including metal, industrial rock, techno and darkwave). This intriguing 2004 release finds Swedish trombonist/producer Nils Landgren putting a funk/neo-soul/hip-hop spin on ABBA's songs, which works surprisingly well in an R&B-oriented environment…