Words: Malcolm Dome

A new Ozzy album is greeted rather like a Christmas visit from your dotty great aunt. On the one hand, it could provide real entertainment. On the other…gawd, has she been on the whiskey again? She’s snoring on the sofa, with her knickers round her ankles!

So, what to make of Scream (Sony). It introduces us to new guitarist Gus G., who overplays a lot of the time, presumably to convince us of his worth in replacing Zakk Wylde.  For different reasons, taking over from the Wylde man is as difficult as the task handed to Jake E. Lee of replacing Randy Rhoads all those years ago. Ozzy’s voice, meantime, sometimes sounds bewildered, while at other points it roars.

The songs? They range from the OK to… the alright. Nothing makes you cringe. Nor is there anything truly spectacular. But you know what… we need Ozzy. And while we’d all love him to make another classic – and he came closer on last album Black Rain – we’ll settle for this, because it means he’s still out there doing it.

During their brief tenure (only four years), earthtone9 were among the most inventive underground metal band around. Some of what they did was so individual and complex that it really should have become a blueprint for progressive metal. Now, eight years after their demise, they’ve brought out the compilation Inside Embers Grow, and they still sound ahead of the game. Order the CD from www.earthtone9.co.uk

Keith Airey is a guitarist who’s played with a load of diverse artists, from The Zombies to Tom Jones and Nik Kershaw. Now he’s got his own project, Aireya 51, and debut album Crimson Tear (AML Records) is a cracking, classy blues-rock collection.

Joined by older brother Don (yep, the keyboards master) and bass playing daughter Olivia, plus Rod Argent (again on keyboards) and drummer Steve Rodford, he really has delivered a genuinely impressive album. It snaps and hums with top level conviction. And not an ABBA influence in sight (a little in joke!).

Therapy? released a mature, dark album last year titled Crooked Timber (DR2). Now, it’s be re-released in what’s term a deluxe gold edition. Apart from the fact that the sleeve is now golden, there are also extra tracks. Really the original music should have been enough to make this a big seller. It’s the band’s best album since 1995’s Infernal Love.

The Enid are among the most resolutely individual, eccentric yet focused of all the British progressive bands. Their music has always been classical in nature, led by some beautiful piano moments from Robert John Godfrey. And new album Journey’s End (Endworks) is a stunning work – perhaps the most satisfying Enid album since 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. There’s a fervent momentum here, with a balance between the sheering grace of much of the music and an underlying thread of darkness. A truly special record.

Lynyrd Skynyrd have always been value for money live. And One More From The Road remains a true classic. But it’s hard to understand quite why they’ve now decided to release Live From Freedom Hall (Roadrunner). It’s a decent recording from 2007, but that’s just the point – it’s three years old. In fact, two of band – bassist Ean Evans and keyboard player Billy Powell have subsequently died. Far from being essential, this is more a case of throwing something out just to keep the name ticking over. Annoyingly, the band were so much better than this album would suggest when they toured here recently.

Nutz were one of those 70s Brit bands who were good enough to make a major impact, but never quite got the breaks to do so. Not unlike, say, Budgie. Well, they’re back together now, and so Tightened Up! (Market Square) is somewhat justified. It’s a live recording from a Nottingham club in 1977, and is actually rather good. The band are hard and focused, with a transatlantic twang to many of the songs. When you hear this, it’s hard to believe that Nutz were destined to fail – barely a footnote in rock history.

Now David Byron did make his mark, via Uriah Heep. But what happened after the singer was fired from Heep in 1976 was a catalogue of projects which foundered and ultimately sank. However, under the name of the David Byron Band, he did release the underrated On The Rocks (Angel Air) in 1981. Now reissued, it is a truly classy, dynamic record with songs that would have done justice to Foreigner or Journey at the time. It has an international vibe, with Byron’s vocals as good as anything he did with Heep.

ABBA – Arrival
1976 (Polar)

Okay, okay, so Abba aren’t exactly a well-kept secret.

Far from it. In fact, they may well just be the most popular pop outfit the world has ever known.

So then why, oh heavens above WHY, do I get, when asking the question, “What’s your favourite Abba album?”, the stock answer of:

“Er… I dunno, er… The Best Of Abba?”

Don’t you people know the albums of Abba?

Hey, maybe you don’t?

Maybe the sales of Mama Mia! tickets and the annual release of Abba’s Golden Greats have distracted the world from the reality of this band’s amazing album output? Either way the consensus would indicate that people are paying criminally little attention to this particular gem of an album.

The reports suggest that although you have a weighty and formidable music collection there is one glaring omission from your stock. Your musical education is stunted by the absence of a major lesson in the history of the world of perfect pop.

And if, dear, dear reader, this is the case then read on. Oh, by Valhalla, read on.

At the point of this, their fourth album, Abba were already major stars in Sweden and the rest of Europe and were beginning to infect the world with their gloriously layered magic. England was no exception, and in 1977 this album became the UK’s best-seller of the year. Not bad for an album who’s recording began in 1975 and finished in 1976. These four photogenic Swedes were in no hurry to finish this work of art, and listening now, 30 years later, this justifiably remarkable collection of songs makes most modern ‘pop’ whither in its considerable shade.

It would be the subsequent releases of Voulez-Vous and Super Trouper that would garner Abba the title of ‘the greatest pop band of all time’, but Arrival was the sound of a band absolutely at their peak, before the ugly divorces became the depressing theme of future hits, and before every album was an attempt out sell its predecessor, overbloating the conquering Scandinavian monster into ultimately coasting on sleepy autopilot.

This was when the band smiled constantly, presumably a mix of fresh Swedish air, ridiculous clothes, rising stardom and listening to some of their own lyrics.

Oh yes, times were good, and aural gold poured from the fjord four in a joyous spring of timeless beauty that you deserve to revisit more often than you presently do. Stop laughing, I’m serious.

When I Kissed The Teacher is a delightful slice of Euro hokum, so playful that it would fail to ignite the most combustible of log cabins, quite frankly, and although a pleasing enough ditty it owns the inappropriate distinction of kicking off such a blockbusting album. The familiar wall-to-wall production (an effect mastered by double tracking every single instrument) is in full effect, as are the wonderfully shrill, perfectly aimed vocals, courtesy of Ann-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog, so all is well with the world. Still, in all honesty, it appears that the songwriting/production masterminds, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, were quite unprepared for the colossal success of the band, or indeed the following single, the brilliant, dance floor-levelling Dancing Queen, kack-handedly thrown in at track two, and decided the running order over a few too many shots of Absolut. The gaping chasm of quality  between the first and second song is actually so disorientating that by track 3 expectations are fairly free and easy.

My Love, My Life is arguably, or in this case without argument, the finest song that Abba ever recorded. A song so emotionally infected that it is capable of moving the most mountainous of critics to tears. Angels bring in the sweetest of verses with a choir of celestial voices until that chorus lifts the song heavenwards with such capable majesty that mere accolades do the composition no justice. Like grande classical music brought bang up to date (okay, the date was ‘76, although the production details have aged not one day) this is the song that should act as the standard example in songwriting tuition for the rest of time. If you’re not patting down the hairs on your arms by the end of this chorus then you and me are made of different DNA buddy.

The Eurovisionally entitled Dum Dum Diddle could only have been written by foreigners. A classic slab of solid, well crafted pop is given the Swedish treatment, with semi-remedial lyrics being thrown in almost as an oversight in order to meet the minimal trading standards required by the governing body for 70’s pop imports. Still, devastatingly awful lyrics aside, and hey, they’re no worse than those early Kiss clunkers, the song is genius and if, like me, you have the ability to divorce dire lyrical fare from masterful songwriting in order to gain maximum enjoyment from the embryonic days of international pop, then there is much to love here.

Of course Knowing Me, Knowing You became one of Abba’s biggest hits, but one wonders if messrs Ulvaeus and Andersson had any idea of its imminent impact when penning this song.
In fact isn’t it fascinating to think that people who changed the world of music were once merely jotting down a few ideas in a note pad and strumming an old acoustic guitar, blissfully unaware of their place in the history books.

I digress.

Knowing Me… further illustrates Abba’s compositional skills with their ever-flowing choruses, never simply ending where a traditional chorus would, or indeed should end, and instead carrying the motif another few miles further down the road that most writers would ditch it.

By the way, pub-quiz fans, did you know that Abba is also the name of a seafood spread, established in 1938? You didn’t? Then you’re welcome. Mine’s a vodka.

The dreary Money, Money, Money follows with clever rhythmic twists but far too many minor chords to exist peacefully on such an up-beat pop album. Like the slightly entertaining drunk that enters the party, laughing louder at their own jokes than anyone else, by the three minute mark you’re relieved to see the back of this jovial oaf and resume the festivities with That’s Me, a wonderful piece of shimmying delight that has Abba regaining their melodic poise upon the throne of throwaway pop music.

Why Did It Have To Be Me? has that much missed classic 70s boogie stomp that makes for a winning formula when mixed with Abba’s trademark harmonies and bouncing piano riffs. A comfortable ride down memory lane where the roads are wide and the trousers are wider. Dances are designed with anything but sex in mind and haircuts act as treasured proof of just how forgiving the human race used to be. Times have changed, boys and girls, and I, for one don’t like it. Oh no. Back then they predicted the year 2000 would feature floating cars and people in silver all-in-one space catsuits. I was lied to. Where is my visual telephone? Oh yeah, I’m writing on it.

Tiger is almost surreal in its portrayal of the girls speaking from the point of view of a huge jungle cat prowling the streets of, presumably, Stockholm. Quite why this would form the subject matter for the song is quite immaterial, suffice it to say that alcohol is accountable for around 25% of deaths in Swedes below the age of 50, and responsible for 90% of lyrics. Probably.

The album ends on a high so death defyingly stratospheric that The Darkness even used this track as an intro tape to their staggering live shows. Arrival is nothing short of amazing. With an intro that sounds like a crowd of surging, bagpipe blowing Vikings the marauders are quickly joined by a flotilla of ponytailed milk maidens in bodice-challenging mid yodel, only to have the entire production capped off with a thousand tiny angels singing in perfect harmony. That, my friend, is Abba Arrival.

Of course you are a rock fan, and Abba are, effectively, the enemy. Their geeful charm at complete odds with the brush chested might of Black Zeppelin and their toothy, Scandinavian grins the lighter side of your prog moon, but, let’s face it, pop music in the present day seems alarmingly deficient in charm of any type whatsoever, be in melodic or otherwise.

Yes, the modern age gave us nothing but cars that still run on petrol, and the ground, backpacks that do not elevate the wearer above the houses, and over expensive clothing that would be of little benefit if worn on a space station. Not only did the modern future give us way less than the 70’s promised but it stripped us, stripped y’hear, of grinning, ever chirpy foreigners and replaced them with po-faced Euro metallers and moody goths.

I ask you, fine folk of the rock jury, is it not time to forgive Abba their crimes of fashion and rejoice in their domestic-drama based choons?

Isn’t it time to reopen the box, chained for decades, marked Swedish imports then stored in a nuclear holocaust proof chamber, and delve, once more, into its melodic delights?

For the betterment of the ears and hearts of mankind can we accept the past as a glorious and fertile breeding ground and denounce the present for the scam that is most surely is?

The answer, as always, is yours.