Because it turned out to be the group's final full-length recording and was a relative commercial disappointment,
ABBA's eighth album,
The Visitors, tends to be viewed as an artistic failure as well. It would be more accurate to see it as a record that demonstrates the reasons for the group's breakup, in the sense that it reflects both the bandmembers' emotional disaffection and the increased musical ambitions of songwriters
Benny Andersson and
Bjorn Ulvaeus, ambitions that would see them moving on to writing stage
musicals. The elegiac, regretful, and occasionally paranoiac tones of the music are inescapable. The title song, though it has since been revealed to concern (vaguely) Soviet dissidents, is a study in
Kafkaesque mental breakdown, even as its music recalls later-period
Beatles.
"When All Is Said and Done" (a pointed title) and
"One of Us" are both plaintive songs of romantic discord. Other songs employ subject matter new to
ABBA, from a parent's wistful reflection on a child's growing up,
"Slipping Through My Fingers," to the comic novelty
"Two for the Price of One." The 2001 reissue, which tacks on four singles tracks that drew the curtain on the band's career in 1982, measurably improves the album. Of particular note is
"The Day Before You Came," a striking story-song in which a woman reviews the mundane state of her life prior to the onset of (one presumes) a life-changing romance. It shows that
Andersson had been listening closely to the British
synth pop movement, particularly
Yaz, and that
Ulvaeus had an affection for
the Beatles'
"She's Leaving Home." It may have been more cinematic than theatrical, but it pointed a direction for the songwriters that took them well beyond
ABBA. In some ways, the group's final recordings were their most interesting, even if they were not the most popular. ~ William Ruhlmann
