Voulez-Vous

Description

That it took nearly a year to record Voulez-Vous is an indicator of the creative and personal box in which the four members of ABBA found themselves at the end of the 70s. Their sixth album coincided with the marital split between Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus and the massively shifting currents in popular music, with disco, which had been on the wane, suddenly undergoing a renaissance thanks to the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. Thus, about half of Voulez-Vous shows the heavy influence of the Bee Gees from their megahit disco era. This is shown not just in the fact that the backing track for the title song was cut at Criteria Studios in Miami, where the Bee Gees had cut Main Course, Children of the World, and most of the rest of their disco-era music, but through the funky beat that ran through much of the material; yet the album still had a pair of soft, lyrical Europop-style ballads, I Have a Dream and Chiquitita, both of which proved as popular as any of the more dance-oriented songs, and were reminders of Fältskogs and Ulvaeus roots, in particular, in popular folk music during the mid- to late 60s. Those two songs, plus Angeleyes, Does Your Mother Know, and the title cut, were all Top Five singles in England, although only Chiquitita was even a Top 40 hit in America, where the albums sales peaked at a modest 500,000 or so. ~ Bruce Eder