Tuesday, February 01, 2011

One of Us and Exposure

A late Abba single, One of Us has an interesting intro. and arrangement more generally. By 1981 Abba were trying to move with the times and use more electronic keyboard or sampled bass, which tended to be a real loss from the sinuous bass guitar of their peak records. I'm not sure what the technical details are for the bass in One of Us - it's part actual guitar, part keyboard-played sample I think - but for this song at least Abba's new approach worked very well:

I believe, however, that Abba may have stolen a bit of the bass and also the intro. sound more generally from the 1978 Gabriel/Fripp song, Exposure (whose more ingenious features, e.g., different instruments play in different time-signatures, also evidently inspired a lot of early Simple Minds):

What do you think?

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