POPNOSE MP3 OF THE WEEK
3. Gemini – “Just Like That”
Sounds a bit like a late ABBA song? That’s because it is – recorded for ABBA’s never-finished 10th album, the original has slipped out in various mixes on bootlegs and a snipped was included on the band’s box set. Meanwhile in 1987 Benni and Bjorn wrote new verses and slowed the song right down, turning it into this weepie and giving it to Swedish pop group Gemini.
So appropriately enough, the verses sound like a chilly out-take from Chess (with fatalist melodrama replacing Tim Rice corn) and the chorus is solid ABBA, which is to say, pretty immediate. Do your best to ignore some of the production infelicities if 80s tinscapes aren’t your thing. The Gemini singer’s more overt lachrymosity is quite un-ABBA, though it works, but the adult ambivalence is very ABBA, and the line “He slipped into my life as smug as a cat” would be wonderful whoever wrote it.