Cher
Dancing Queen
Release Date: Sep 28, 2018
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Warner Bros.
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Album Review: Dancing Queen by Cher
Very Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 4/5
It's no musical masterpiece, but Cher's album of Abba covers is joyously camp - and also surprisingly poignant At this stage in her six-decade career, the usual rules don’t apply to Cher, still the only performer to straddle a giant canon in a pop video the year after winning an Oscar. She evidently enjoyed chewing the Greek island scenery so much in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again that her second album since 2001 should be a collection of Abba covers. But to be honest, if anyone out there objects to this marriage made in gay heaven, there’s only one legitimate response.
Based on rating 6/10
Dancing Queen isn't the soundtrack to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again but it's something sexier: an ABBA covers album by Cher inspired by her role as Ruby in the 2018 film. Cher didn't sing much in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again -- she duetted with Andy Garcia on "Fernando" and was part of the crew singing "Super Trouper" -- but it was enough to whet her appetite to sing more of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus' songs, so she headed into the studio with her producer Mark Taylor and cut ten quick covers. Bearing the perhaps-inevitable title Dancing Queen, the tribute is swift and breezy, especially for a record that doesn't take liberties with the original arrangements.
Opinion: Fantastic
Camp - as Susan Sontag put it, in the 1964 essay, On Camp, that's practically synonymous with her name - is "something of private code, a badge of identity, even". It is a potent language of cues and signifiers, of sly references and elaborate slight of hand. If you know, you know. And in the vocabulary of modern camp, ABBA and Cher are the first three letters of the alphabet.
Opinion: Excellent
A s Cher proved in her Mamma Mia: Her We Go Again! cameo, she need do very little to provoke squealing acclaim when it comes to Abba dabbling: merely descend from a helicopter in stately fashion and sing Fernando in that thrillingly ripe tone. But Dancing Queen, an album of Abba covers that could easily have sailed by like glitter on the breeze, is often surprisingly ingenious. Occasionally Cher uses her trademark Auto-Tune like a crutch - it's a cop-out on One of Us - but mostly it acts as a kind of interstellar portal that elevates Abba from the dancefloor to the cosmos.
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