By Ian MacDonald
Uncut Magazine
There are two schools on Steely Dan: those who like the early poppier stuff With Tunes: those who prefer the later, purer stuff Without Tunes. Either way, it’s all one continuous cool third stream. This group (for, whoever its changing participants, it’s always a group) has consistently made the most urbanely expressive popular music since we waved a resigned farewell to that now nearly inconceivable Golden Age of Beatles, Dylan, Motown, Beach Boys, Brill, Bacharach, and others too numerous.
Apart from its use for tour-promotion and the Alive In America album in 1995-6, the Steely Dan brand-name has been mothballed since Becker and Fagen’s most extreme voyage into refinement, Gaucho, was registered on vinyl in 1980. Has there ever, in this anxious business, been so prolonged a pause between instalments? Has such a pause produced anything other than disillusion at the far end? Not till now.
If the words “extreme” and “refinement” didn’t turn your attention off, we can take it that you are prepared, at least, to entertain the proposition that Two Against Nature is the best thing Steely Dan have ever done, despite being a further 20 years along the blue horizon in their aforesaid journey into the rare. Which is to say: even later, even purer, even withouter Without Tunes…Yet still just-below-room-temperature lensflare-dazzlin’. Out there, Frontier. Looking Ahead, Binoculars.
So obliquely futuristic that at first it doesn’t even seem to be here, this exquisite album reminds you of the older jazzman who, faced with the swiftness of Parker and Gillespie’s bebop improvisations, admitted “Man, I can’t hear that fast!” On the slick surface of its Thunderbird carapace, the Steely Dan ethos appears languid, often operating on something close to, but not quite, cruise-control. The speed is all inside: in the depth and detail of thought, the precision sensors beneath the sporting grace. Only deeper acquaintance with this sleek thing allows you to sense its specifications; till then you’re slower than what you’re hearing. It’ll seem insubstantial. You may not quite catch it flashing by like the longest lowest dragster on Bonneville Flats.
What’s it about? The usual stuff, only this time with a new photo-realistic clarity and a warmer up-closeness. A 20-year hiatus has failed to dent the continuity of the music Becker and Fagen make together. Knowing them apart through their solo albums, we can only marvel at how the synergy between them produces stuff not only a level higher than what they do alone, but also of a different character. When they collaborate as equals, the result is Steely Dan, Separate, neither can do this trick.
With Becker’s down-in-the-gutter cynicism balanced by Fagen’s looking-up-at-the-stars lightness, the gritty Zevonesque dark-rock of the former’s 11 Tracks Of Whack meets the drolly glamorous soul/lounge/jazz pastiches of the latter’s The Night Fly and Kamakiriad … dissolving into Two Against Nature, an album so clean, clear, and dry that it may seem sterile on first hearing. Indeed, some will say as much. Wrong.
Having said that, Becker and Fagen do tend to keep their drummers on too tight a leash. Example: the closer, “West Of Hollywood,” which might as well have been sequenced and whose final four minutes (a strivingly virtuosic Coltranian tenor solo over incessant modulations) beg for something more spontaneous. Apart from that, the inaugural impression of desiccation quickly fades as something else comes into focus: educated deftness of a lucidity rarely encountered nowadays. The life and humour in the music begins to shine as you learn your way around those initially arbitrary-seeming sequences and recognise the subtle aptness of the lyric-melodic fit. Born genre-blenders, Becker and Fagen have long proved adept at pulling crafty cardsharp switches on styles, as evidenced by their less manifest reggae mutations (“Peg,” “Babylon Sisters”), Here, they do it again with the aerial grace of “Negative Girl,” swinging out on a tape-delayed Dean Parks guitar arpeggio almost as beautiful as Denny Diaz’s comparable figure on “King Of The World” from all of 27 years ago, But it takes a few hearings to spot that the spaced, entry-overlapping air-funk of the opener, “Gaslighting Abbie,” is their version of James Brown –- or that the voodoo title track, despite being in 6/4, is also, under the bonnet, that old funk-soul, brother.
The traditional column-inch requirements of headline and photograph forestall discourse on further details, This being so, it behooves us to cite with honour Fagen’s never-finer vocal phrasing and gorgeous horn arrangements, Becker’s paradigmatic rhythm guitar, the soloists throughout, the wily backing vocals, the dual-purpose yet pellucid lyrics, the crisp demonstration-quality mixes, and the general air of blithe nonchalance radiating from an album that fully deserves to be called a masterpiece. Four years in the making, Two Against Nature is so close to perfect that its passing flaws -– a couple of overstretched fades, the low vocal mix on the title track, the not-quite-cooked “West Of Hollywood,” and what appears to be (gulp) an audible tape-edit at 4:27 in “Cousin Dupree” -– irk in a way they wouldn’t on 99 out of a hundred albums. Musicians and studio-buffs will love it to death and listen intently; fans, too. The unconvinced (and/or those who prefer it louder and shaggier) will remain so.
If Becker and Fagen can knock out one of these every four years until they retire, we’ll get five more Steely Dan albums by the year 2020.
Worth sticking around for.
No comments yet.