Different From "ABBA Gold," But Still great

I loved this follow up to "ABBA Gold," yet this album delivers a very different set of ABBA hits. If you are a casual ABBA fan and want to listen to the songs that were most prominent on the radio like "SOS" and "Dancing Queen," you may want to opt for the original ABBA Gold.

What makes "More Gold" stand apart from the original is revealed best in the lyrics. The first "Gold" has songs of love, sensual desire, and inspiration, all that express the core passions in a nutshell. The songs in "More Gold" tend to tell more detailed stories behind these emotions, be it a slice-of-life narrative like "The Day Before You Came" (a woman recounting the last time her weekday routine felt comfortable but mundane, which was the day before she meets her lover for the first time)or a classic myth in "Cassandra."

The story telling nature of the tunes on "More Gold" sound more like something we would hear in a stage musical rather than on the radio or a rock concert. Perhaps Benny & Bjorn were getting the "theater bug" while penning these songs, as both went on to collaberate on musicals like "Chess" and "Kristina Fran Duvemala."

The most recognizable hit on this CD is "I Do, I Do, I do," but virtually every song is a pleasure. The only tracks that left me flat were "I Wonder" (I love whimsical songs, but this was a little too over-the-top melodramatic for me) and "When I Kissed the Teacher." Neither of these tunes take anything away from "More Gold" being a great buy.

I Do Love This Collection

ABBA's success was so big that there's hits for two CDs. This is Greatest Hits number 2 collection. Like ABBA's first collection this also includes many great hits "Summer Night City", "Angeleyes", "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do", "So Long", "Honey Honey", "Ring Ring", "Under Attack" etc. There's however songs in this album too..."Eagle", "The Visitors", "I Am the City" are just boring or terrible songs. This group of two female and two male is one of the greatest pop bands ever. They are the most famous group aftet "The Beatles". I think this collection should have been better if there would have been some songs from "Waterloo"...like "Hasta Manana", "Gonna Sing You My Love Song"...Their carriere was quite long but not too long. They stopped when they were more popular than ever.

Stars: I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, Honey Honey, Ring Ring, Angeleyes

Not as Strong as ABBA Gold, But Still An Entertaining Listen

The 1992 collection ABBA GOLD was not just proof that ABBA was a major hitmaking machine in the 1970s- it also happened to be a huge success around the world, paving the way for another collection of more of the same; hence 1993's MORE ABBA GOLD. In its 20-track listing, MORE ABBA GOLD basically contains the hits that did not make it on ABBA GOLD plus a few strong album tracks. On paper, that reads as another excellent listen completely in line with ABBA GOLD, and while the majority of these songs are really good, that's not really quite the case.



The key is to understand that the appeal of ABBA's career was largely built on the classic groundbreaking songs from ABBA, ARRIVAL, and THE ALBUM rather than the trend-following craft of VOULEZ-VOUS, SUPER TROUPER, and THE VISITORS. Even if these two eras were equally represented on ABBA GOLD, the collection still worked marvelously because the songs from their last three albums were excellent evidence of ABBA at the top of their game. Here, there are no less than 13 songs from that era, which also includes a couple of singles at the end of the group's career, a few stray B-sides, and the OK 1982 rarity "I Am the City." While some of these 13 entries can stand next to entries from ABBA GOLD- in particular, "When All Is Said and Done," "The Day Before You Came," "Summer Night City," and "On and On and On"- the rest, at least in this setting, are a little too constrained to provide multiple enjoyable listens. Even if they are as just as good, if not better, than the other seven pre-VOULEZ-VOUS songs here, they nevertheless hold MORE ABBA GOLD back because they came at a time when the group was following trends rather than setting them.



It should be mentioned, though, that this judgment is a little unfair, since ABBA did release more singles from VOULEZ-VOUS onward than they had from their third to fifth albums, partially because of demand from various markets around the world. With that said, MORE ABBA GOLD is still an excellent follow-up to the casual listener who already owns ABBA GOLD and wants to dig a little deeper into ABBA's catalog. But no matter how good it is, the MORE collection can't help but undercut ABBA's status as the greatest singles artist of the 1970s. So if you're a newcomer to ABBA and looking towards buying a collection of their hits, you're better off getting the subsequent THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION, which not only collects all the big hits ABBA had during their career, but sequences them in chronological order and, unlike the GOLD collections, starts the ABBA story at the very beginning of their career with "People Need Love."