ABBA - Voulez-Vous (1979) [1992, Japan]

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ABBA - Voulez-Vous (1979) [1992, Japan]

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"Voulez-Vous" is the 6th studio album by the Swedish group ABBA, released in 1979. It features a number of hits such as "Chiquitita", "Does Your Mother Know" and "I Have a Dream" and showed the group embrace disco music, which was at its peak at the time. The album peaked at #1 in a number of countries and was one of the top five-selling albums in the UK for that year. It was the first ABBA album to be mainly recorded at Polar Studios in Stockholm, and the only ABBA album to include a studio recording made outside Sweden: the instrumental backing track for the title track was partly recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami. "Voulez-Vous" topped the charts all over Europe (including the UK, where it entered the charts at #1 and remained there for a month), and was a Top 10 success in countries including Canada, New Zealand and Australia. In the US, Voulez-Vous became ABBA's third album to reach the Top 20 (peaking at #19).

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ABBA - Voulez-Vous (1979) [1992, Japan]

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That it took nearly a year to record Voulez-Vous is an indicator of the creative and personal constraints 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 Fältskog's 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" and "Does Your Mother Know" were Top 40 hits in America, where the album's sales peaked at a modest 500,000 or so.

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ABBA - Voulez-Vous (1979) [1992, Japan]

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ABBA - Voulez-Vous (1979) [1992, Japan]

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