ABBA - Lay All Your Love On Me

[1980]

People go on about European electro-pop and disco with pioneers like Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Numan and what have you but do ABBA ever get seriously noticed when it comes to innovation and just plain peak state of the art sound... I dunno. They were always doing something weird or dark in the background that you might not have noticed on initial listening. 

Here's a quote from Carl Magnus Palm taken from his book ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions (1994):

"Lay All Your Love on Me is known for a descending vocal sound at the end of the verse immediately preceding the refrain. This was achieved by sending the vocal into a harmoniser device, which was set up to produce a slightly lower-pitched version of the vocal. In turn its output was fed back to its input, thereby continually lowering the pitch of the vocal. Andersson and Ulvaeus felt that the chorus of the song sounded like a hymn, so parts of the vocals in the choruses were run through a [[vocoder]], to recreate the sound of a church congregation singing, slightly out of tune."

When listening on the hi-fi or through headphones all manner of unusual spooky shit reveals itself. That's pre-DJ Screw shadowy chopped and screwed shenanigans at the end of the verses innit. Then, I mean, a church choir deliberately being made to sound slightly wrong without you actually realising is pretty perverse, unnerving and kinda sinister. This deleterious to your unassuming mind chicanery is similar to the psychological games that certain scenes in horror movies play upon you. 

Interesting.