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Review: 'Psychotic Youth'
'ABBA (EP)'   


-  Genre: 'Punk/New Wave' -  Release Date: '25th May 2021'

Our Rating:
It’s true that I’ve never been a fan of ABBA, and back in the 90s gave my lodger my £300 midi hi-fi just so she could keep her endless loop of ‘ABBA Gold’ to her room instead of playing it in the living room. I just don’t dig them. I grew up with ABBA on the radio, and like most music I’d hear on the radio at home as a kid, I get why some bands cover them – The Sisters of Mercy’s take on ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimme’ at a handful of shows in 1984 is a masterclass in subversion – but not why here in 2021, we’re still getting whole EPs of ABBA covers – as if Erasure’s wasn’t more than enough.

Swedish punk rock act Psychotic Youth have been going 36 years (a 6-year break around the turn of the millennium notwithstanding), and ‘ABBA’ represents their first EP release since 2000’s ‘Leaving The 20th Century Alive,’ and follows last year’s ‘Forever and Never’ album.

‘SOS’ kick off with a sinewy guitar that shops and cuts and there’s some promise of some kind of dark menace – but then the ultra-buoyant chorus lands and blows away the shadows in a rush of fun. It’s about forgivable, but the same can’t be said of the jubilant bouncy punk-pop oof ‘Super Trouper’. I’ve always felt the second phrase of the chorus should be ‘feeling like a number two’.

What’s worst about this EP – and the rendition of ‘Mamma Mia’ is exemplary – is just how true to form and genre type it all is: it’s punk-pop ABBA covers by numbers. No imagination, no twist, beyond the fact that it’s ABBA played with punky guitars. If you can imagine generic pop-punk versions of ABBA songs, then you don’t need to actually listen to this.

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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