It's the pop music equivalent of that bag of cheese doodles that taunts you from the vending machine at work: you know they're made of soylent green and pencil shavings, but you buy them anyway because you don't have time to run out and buy a real lunch between your noon and 1 pm meetings. And then, a few days later, you inexplicably find yourself craving them. Next thing you know, you're involuntarily shoving a dollar bill into the slot every day at noon like clockwork because your brain is convinced that MSG and Yellow #9 are what your body needs to survive. Or something like that.
It's just that everything is so perfectly rendered on "Dancing Queen."
There's that simultaneous ecstasy and agony vibe in the twin lead vocals of Swedish bombshells Agentha Fältskog and Frida Lyngstad, made even more dramatic by the tear-jerker strings and Rachmaninoff-like piano fills. (I'm convinced that only Scandinavians could create a song about a teenager going clubbing that makes you want to sob.)
What keeps me coming back to this track, though, is the drumming of Roger Palm. Influenced by the deep New Orleans funk on Dr. John's 1972 album Dr. John's Gumbo and George McRae's 1974 proto-disco song "Rock Your Baby," Palm lays down a rhythm track that's just a little behind the beat to give the song a bit of swagger and funk. It singlehandedly keeps the beat from being your typical tiss-tah-tiss-tah-tiss-tah-tiss-tah disco banality. In fact, if I could isolate just the drum track on this song, I'd probably listen to it ten times a day instead of twice a day like I do now...
I've said too much.
(Damn you, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and your pop tunesmithery.)
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