While I just admitted that I dared to critique an album I’ve never heard in its entirety [scandalous!] I’m now going to analyze a record that’s also missing from my collection.  Typically, when listening critically for a Rock GPA, I listen and re-listen over the course of a week or two to nothing but the albums concerned. I couldn’t do that for the sixth ABC album because in the case of “Abracadabra” there’s a great reason why it’s not on the racks. I traded it in many years ago! Adding insult to injury, I had purchased it for a buck! Here’s the tale.

ABC – Abracadabra | 1991 – 1

Since I was highly resistant to the “Up” album after exposure to the pre-release single, ABC were off my plate, so to speak. I was dimly aware that ABC had released another album, but I saw that there was a Black Box remix of the single added as a bonus track. That was all I needed to know, since Black Box were a creepy Italo-House act fronted by a model [it was whispered a transexual as well] who lip-synched to yet more Martha Wash vocal tracks. Lovely.  A year or two passed and then I saw the album as a cutout at Camelot Music, back in the day when there was an immense selection of cutout product of a reasonably high level of desirability in the mall retailer. The price? A lowly dollar. Surely it was worth eight bits of pocket change?

Sadly, it wasn’t. My memory of the album was that it was even blander than the refried house groove of “One Better World” and being tied to the later piano house style, how couldn’t it be? In the mid-90s I did my last great music purge, and the two ABC house discs in my collection said “bye bye.” Yes, this album was not even worth a dollar to me, since I got virtually no enjoyment from it. Even though I have “the collector’s sickness!” This says a lot! Apparently, even the Dutch compiler of “ABC: The Ultimate Collection” agrees with me. While the 3xCD set I referenced last posting covers all of ABC’s career from ’81-’97, only the two singles from “Abracadabra” were deemed worthy of inclusion. Comparatively, the much maligned “Beauty Stab” has five tracks to show for all of the enmity directed toward it.

“Say It” is as good as this program gets with a barely memorable chord progression and a lyric that sticks out in my mind as to the wrong-headedness of the whole escapade. Fry intones at one point:

“I was baked Alaska, burning deep inside.”

As anyone who has actually had baked Alaska may know, it’s frozen inside. Not hot. The meringue firms up and gets slightly toasted while keeping the ice cream from melting during its brief stay in the oven. Lyric fail, Mr. Fry. Speaking of lyrics, the other single is no great shakes either.

“Making like a Romeo, making on a Juliet, she said Maybe you’re a Montague, maybe you’re a Capulet Maybe you don’t trust me yet, let me light your cigarette Be you shark, be you jet, never forget that

Love conquers all (L O V E, love) Love conquers all (L O V E, love)”

That’s some comedown from a lyricist who was once held in the esteem of an Elvis Costello.  Worse yet, the music for “Love Conquers All” is a barely there bit of programmed bass that offers little of the arrangement acumen that ABC records once were drowning in. It sounds like a demo that got loose in the marketplace to me.

This album was the first and last made for the BMG label after six releases on Mercury/Polygram for the band. “Love Conquers All” barely marshaled a showing in the UK top 50 so after this album hit the skids, Martin Fry and Mark White jumped off the boat while at least the prow was still above the water and bid “adieu” to the good ship ABC. After ten years of diminishing returns, the band had been dissolved. At the time, it was just as well to me. I hadn’t liked their last two albums at all, and the nineties were shaping up to be a hellish musical decade for me. The few of my favorite acts still producing music were foundering in a sea of wildly popular grunge and rave styles that I hated. As someone who grew up to the awful sound of early 70s US top 40, it was hard to imagine that there could ever be a worse period for popular music, yet there I was, stuck right in the middle of it. Well I wouldn’t have ABC to kick around any more.

Next: They keep pulling him back in…