Dancing Queen

The party standards are present and correct. ‘Mamma Mia’ is as dizzying good and gay as you’ll get, the aural equivalent of downing three bottles of pink fizz in an Uber with Magic FM, getting pissed with your pals, on the way to the best night of your life. ‘Waterloo’ crashes in on glam-rock drums, a pantomime dame in silver thigh-highs, as she battles and bosses that irresistible chorus. ‘SOS’? Not even going to talk about it. It’s a double-dunt of serotonin; a sure-fire cure for sadness.

Dancing Queen pulls off a perfect balance of frothy effervescence and resonant emotional depth.

The 72-year-old makes ABBA songs not only sound like they should’ve been written for her in the first place but like they firmly belong in 2018, a feat considering the sometimes deliciously dated production and performance of many of ABBA’s biggest hits.

This is an enormously enjoyable album that doesn’t just deliver on its kitsch potential; it also makes you feel both moved and exhilarated.

Dancing Queen 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.

You can enjoy the album and still wish that producer Taylor had done more to put a new or distinctive signature on this time-honored material. Well, actually, he adds one trademark touch fairly often: The overt AutoTune phasing that made his collaboration with Cher on 1998’s “Believe” so memorable returns here any number of times.

It is a testament to just how utterly robust these songs are that the results are, inescapably, joyous. The recordings have been given a bit of digital oomph, with all the sounds polished and honed, and levels kicked up a notch, so the result is dense and shiny, with a relentlessly modern attack.

It's just enough of an update to feel fresh, yet familiar enough to be nothing but a dose of glitzy, cheerful nostalgia.