Rating: 3 out of 5.
Final albums are hardly ever planned. In the case of ABBA, The Visitors served as their last release, bar compilations and cash grabs, for decades. Voyage would burst this streak of solid albums with standout singles, but at least it appealed to the next generation of ABBA fans. Those whose hardship is not having a Europop release to call their own, one that had released in their lifetime. They have that now, but it’s at the sacrifice of The Visitors, an album that feels, tonally, as though the end has come naturally. ABBA would suggest, in their final performance, that they’d have continued a bit longer had The Day Before You Came been a hit. But ABBA had failed to adapt, as many artists would find, to the pop expectations of the 1980s. They were still popular in Finland and Belgium, though. Take stock of that before discarding The Visitors. But where there had once been chart domination, as was the point of ABBA’s work for a decade, they couldn’t keep up with the synth of the times.
Whether that’s the sole reason for ABBA quietly disbanding after The Visitors is unknowable. What we can gauge, however, is that had they continued, they’d have been unable to better their work on Voulez-Vous from a few years before The Visitors released. This 1981 album is beyond tame and even the standout tracks, the sudden surge of interest in Slipping Through My Fingers for instance, is built on emotional projection from a listener, rather than anything the band has achieved. ABBA adapts rather half-heartedly to popular tones, though are still trying to kindle their Europop style. The opening, title track is a messy one, where synth-like thuds are given precedence over what could’ve been an emotionally complex story. Best of luck in trying to hear that over the clangs of noise, the garish instrumental misstep made by the band is brutal. It’s at least better than the follow-up, Head Over Heels.
ABBA never stopped writing plain love songs, but their grasp on what makes them tick is lost here. Instrumentally loose and yet standing in defiance of their previous sound. It’s a tug of war between the old instrumental styles and narrative experiences and the new generation. ABBA never sounds comfortable with this balance act, nor does it sound as though the band wants to go one way or the other. Below par offerings like When All is Said and Done and the later Two for the Price of One are not the only offerings from ABBA here, who try and succeed in a few subtle mood changes. Soldiers is the first success to be found on The Visitors, and it’s followed up nicely with I Let the Music Speak and One of Us. Two solid tracks which are standouts more because they’re not as bad as the other, looser-sounding songs, rather than doing anything all that great.
Where there may be praise for ABBA redefining their Europop sound with some harsher moments, Soldiers particularly, it’s never enough to fight back the pop music tide. ABBA are still a commodity first, a collective second. ABBA leans into this new tone too heavily, and in turn makes it just another style to add their usual pop structure to, rather than a clean break that could’ve offered the group new life. Instrumentally rich moments like One of Us, soppy as they are, can be few and far between for ABBA. The Visitors has little love to give, be it in the groovy bass of that standout track filtering through forgotten romances, or the brushes with faith on Like an Angel Passing Through My Room. It’s a scattershot of ideas, none strong enough to push ABBA on through the 1980s.
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