The blog One Week/One Band is based on a simple but effective premise: ‘Every week, one trusted music aficionado showcases a band or artist he/she feels particularly passionate about’.

The archive of the site is well worth checking out, but an excellent starting point might be with last week’s ‘aficionado’,Tom Ewing, who wrote on Abba. Ewing, a former Pitchfork regular and founder of Freaky Trigger, has written very interestingly about the band in the past, and his work at OW/OB was no exception, being suitably filled with witty and unexpected observations about ABBA:

If there’s one song which definitively puts down the ‘late ABBA’ marker, it’s ‘Happy New Year’, an astonishing mix of jollity and bleakness, a grinning skull with a party hat. You get the impression Benny and Bjorn must have spotted a gap in the market for a pop rival to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ — Christmas songs do great, why not New Years? Then they decided to fill it with a song which takes New Years as an opportunity to meditate on the laughable futility of all human endeavour.