Abba The Album Rare Near Mint 1977 Atlantic Records Original US LP HTF

$

25

You are considering this album from my mother's collection.  She is a musician who takes great care of her music and has recently downsized, so her loss is your gain!  
ABBA: The Album Studio album by ABBA Released 12 December 1977 Recorded 31 May – 22 November 1977 Studio Marcus, Metronome and Glen Studios, Stockholm and Bohus Studio, Kungälv Length 40:01 (Polar LP 1977) Label Polar
Epic (UK)
Atlantic (US original release) Producer

• Benny Andersson
• Björn Ulvaeus

ABBA: The Album is the fifth studio album by the Swedish pop group ABBA. It was released in Scandinavia on 12 December 1977 through Polar Music, but due to the massive pre-orders the UK pressing plants were not able to press sufficient copies before Christmas 1977 and so it was not released in the UK until January 1978. The album was released in conjunction with ABBA: The Movie, with several of the songs featured in the film.

The album contained two UK number-one singles, "Take a Chance on Me" and "The Name of the Game", as well as European hits "Eagle" and "Thank You for the Music".

Overview

The album includes three songs from ABBA's 1977 tour mini-musical The Girl with the Golden Hair. These songs are "Thank You for the Music", "I Wonder (Departure)" and "I'm a Marionette". Altogether the album contained just nine songs—the least of any ABBA album, but were longer in length than previous albums (opening track "Eagle" runs to nearly six minutes).

ABBA: The Album reached No. 1 in many territories. In the UK it debuted at the top and remained there for seven weeks,[4] ending up as the third biggest selling album of the year (behind the movie soundtrack LPs of Saturday Night Fever and Grease). In the US it became their highest charting album, where during 1978 ABBA undertook a big promotional campaign. Due to the Cold War, Western music was actively discouraged throughout Eastern Europe at the time. Despite this, ABBA: The Album sold an unprecedented one million copies in Poland in 1977, exhausting the country's entire allocation of foreign currency. In Russia, only 200,000 copies were permitted to be pressed; however, demand within the USSR indicated they could have sold 40 million copies.[5]

ABBA: The Album was first released on CD in 1984. The album has been reissued in the format by PolyGram (later Universal Music) four times; first in 1997, then in 2001, in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set and again in 2007 as a two disc 'Deluxe Edition'.

Cover artwork

Polar's official cover featured an entirely white background, and is the basis for current CD versions. However, Epic Records' original UK release of the LP featured a blue background on the front cover, fading to white at the bottom. It also featured a gatefold sleeve. The back cover was altered, incorporating a similar photo of ABBA to that used elsewhere in the world for the inner sleeve, and referencing tracks included in ABBA: The Movie. The inner gatefold was designed to look like an air mail envelope, similar to the style later used for Gracias Por La Música and even had a photo of ABBA incorporated into a stamp in the corner.

This was the first and only time that Epic radically broke away from the standard Polar Music design for an ABBA album. The UK design for ABBA: The Album has only been re-issued on CD format once, as part of a limited edition boxed set released by the Japanese arm of Universal Music in 2004.

Production

Within the audio enthusiast community, The Album's original LP release is known for having been sourced from a poor quality master tape, that affects all four tracks on Side A. Symptoms include distortion on the higher-end of the frequency range, and a 'muddier' sound, particularly in the percussion.[6] The single masters for "Eagle", "Take A Chance On Me", and "The Name Of The Game", are perceived not to have these defects, the first generation mixes for these tracks were used in Greatest Hits Vol. 2, while the 1990s compilations were remastered by Michael Tretow, the original recording engineer. They were also used for re-issues in 1997 and 2001, however these versions were criticised for Jon Astley's use of equalisation and noise reduction. Re-issues that used the 'faulty' LP cutting tapes include the West German PolyGram CD from 1984, and the Complete Studio Recordings box set, with tracks remastered by Henrik Jenssen. To date the sole use of the clean tapes since 2001 has been the 'Mastered For iTunes' 2014 issue, which reportedly lacks any distortion.

Track listing

LP version

All tracks written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, except where noted.