I'm surprised there was even this much of a performance/reunion! Agnetha had some really hard times with travel and an obsessed fan unfortunately. I can't blame her for wanting nothing to do with any sort of larger scale reunion. I tuned Abba out for awhile in the late '70s, like the Bee Gees, but am glad that later on I went back and listened to all the great work I missed because of that from both groups, especially from the 1980s (and the Chess musical). There are also a lot of pre-Abba and other Swedish releases... they are mostly in Swedish but there are some great pieces of music in there too.
The Carpenters had a few tracks where they decided to do a more mechanical voice doubling effect and those are the only ones I could call a guilty pleasure. Because of the huge amount of time it used to take to overdub all the vocals Richard tried something that was quicker but you can really tell the difference. I wish he'd release more of the pre-Carpenters 1960s demos when they were called Spectrum and Summerchimes, they were more like the Mamas & Papas.
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