Frida - Frida [Box Set] (CD)

All Music Guide

This fourCD/oneDVD set is a welcome addition to the ancillary ABBA catalog, offering as it does stateoftheart updates on Frida's four albums for Polar Records, plus a video documentary covering 40 years in her career. Ensam, produced by Benny Andersson and recorded during 1974 and 1975, opens the package the album, a number one record in Sweden, is an enjoyably upbeat, totally unthreatening piece of poprock on which the singer covers material ranging from "Fernando" (which had not yet been done by ABBA) through "Young Girl" and "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (all in Swedish, of course) in suitably ornate arrangements, which are not surprisingly somewhat reminiscent of ABBA's work. There's lots of multitracking in evidence, all pretty enough, even if the overall album is not extremely exciting; the remastering here (with a pair of bonus tracks thrown on as well) helps a bit, as just about every detail of the arrangements and the multilayered sound gli...tters, and even the relatively restrained drumming fairly booms. Jumping from that to Something's Going On in the 1980's bridges a world of rock and the international stage, and the need by the singer to make a much bigger splash luckily, she had Phil Collins at the peak of his powers producing, and the result was a big a sound as needed; here it's not just the rippling electric guitars and the explosive drumming on the title track, and similar moments elsewhere that are enhanced, but the acoustic guitars on "Threnody", and the interweaving of voices on "Here I'll Stay", as well as the brass accompaniment ahead of the final chorus and verse that is brought forward a whole raft of detail is brought out in this new edition. The album is also enhanced with the solo version of the latter song, and the singleedit of "There's Something Going On". Shine, recorded in 1984 under producer Steve Lillywhite, was more restrained sonically than its predecessor but is no less impressive here, the voice and instruments all out there like this is the playback of the original master tape it's also been enhanced with a pair of single tracks/edits. Djupa Andetag, Frida's last solo album to date recorded in 1996 has undergone the least transformation from its original incarnation; it was a CD to start with, done long after they'd learned to cope with the new format; it's still pretty gorgeous here in its moody way, and has been enhanced with a trio of single tracks. The four CDs between them offer the combined threeandahalf hours and change of the singer's solo work, overlapping with and postdating ABBA, which is certain to appeal to even casual fans of the group, especially in this sound quality the DVD, however (which comes in both NTSC and PAL editions, for viewers in America and Europe, respectively), is either a whopping big dollop of icing on that cake, or the real focus of the package, depending upon how serious a fan of ABBA or Frida one happens to be. With a combined total of three hours of visual material, it covers the singer's whole career from 1964 to 2005, as well as much of her life during this period, and includes an astonishingly wide array of performance clips (covering her early work in jazz, when her main influences were Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day) through her entry into pop music (including an intentionally funny cover of "Baby Love") in Swedish), right up to the present day. The section covering the ABBA years is, for obvious reasons, made up mostly of her talk (there are optional subtitles in English and a halfdozen other languages) with stills, rather than video clips the two exceptions are a pair of clips, of "Why Did It Have To Be Me" and "Fernando", from ABBA: The Movie. The disc returns to active music and music videos again for her postABBA discussion, which also includes clips from various documentary and other sources, specifically one dealing with the circumstances of the recording of Something's Going On, plus the videos from that album and the followup, Shine; each comes with a short introduction by the artist, shot in 2005. The DVD covers her life right up to the end of 2005, and even the interview clips have a certain visual splendor, shot as they are in the shadow of the Matterhorn. The content throughout is delightful and fascinating, and one can be grateful to the producers for having taken the trouble to license the array of performance and other supporting video clips used here it can't have been easy or inexpensive, and even the casual ABBA fan may be surprised at seeing the singer doing "Just One Of Those Things" early in her career. The only flaw is in the programming of the menu of the disc, which is somewhat cumbersome but when a DVD is loaded up with an much material as this one is, that's almost an inevitability, and it's a small price to pay, especially since the makers have seen to it that the image and the sound are both excellent. The packaging of the box is extremely convenient and compact, and there's an accompanying dual language annotation booklet to go with the seven hours of listening and viewing. - Bruce Eder, All Music Guide Read more Less