| Never so much a band as the slyly crafted specter of one, Steely Dan's
mid-1990s "return" to live performance was as surprising as it was perverse.
They'd previously toured only once, round about the era of Watergate,
pet rocks, and Shaft. A half-decade after their concert comeback and a
mere 19 years after Gaucho seemingly closed out their recording career,
the jazz-pop conceit of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen deliberately dropped
back into a recording landscape where they weren't so much seasoned vets
as alien ambassadors. Two Against Nature, indeed. The tack is instantly
familiar: a musical/lyrical reconciliation of Monk and Newman, with familiar
harmonic flourishes, nimble studio chops, and an icy, world-class cool,
as willfully insulated from hip-hop and techno as it was from disco and
Top 40. Less concerned with melodic hooks than a canny sophistication
of mood and manner, Becker and Fagen never let a trite melody get in the
way of a good story, whether their protagonists are plotting some nefarious
obliquity ("Gaslighting Abby"), Southern-fried incest (the deliciously
funky "Cousin DuPree"), or bleakly confronting dashed expectations ("What
a Shame About Me"). A little more musically languorous perhaps, its trademark
cynicism now undercut by hints of sadness and regret, this is nonetheless
a Steely Dan album worthy of the name, and like the best of them, one
whose subtle charms reveal themselves in surprising ways. |
