Agnetha Faltskog
My Colouring Book
(WEA)
Four years ago, the famously reclusive former Abba singer Agnetha Faltskog (the blonde one) embarked on a project to record a covers album of some of her favourite 1960s tunes. And My Colouring Book is the pleasing, and eminently easy-listening, result. It delivers 43 minutes of mellow enjoyment, featuring one of the finest voices of the poptastic 1970s - and one that remains as uplifting and crystalline as it did on Dancing Queen or Knowing Me, Knowing You.
The first single, If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind, is doing well in Britain and Europe, but is by no means the best here. When You Walk into the Room, the Jackie de Shannon classic, is the highlight: a surging, lushly orchestrated hymn to unstoppable love - or rather, the kind of crush that most thirty- and fortysomething males had on Agnetha in the days when the Stockholm fab four ruled the world.
The oft-covered What Now My Love, originally written by Gilbert Becaund, is another brilliant offering, and one that benefits from post-60s technological advances. The Edge-influenced digital-delay guitar track enriches and updates this enduring standard wonderfully. And hearing Agnetha 2004, I'd sooner listen to her than Frank Sinatra warble through Bart Howard's Fly Me to the Moon any day. Its gentle bossa nova reworking, juxtaposed against Agnetha's golden larynx, can't be faulted.