It is interesting to me how much my perspective on the band has shifted over the last week and a half. My first impression was super positive. I’d had relatively low expectations and Can’t Buy a Thrill felt steady and super well put together. Super enjoyable to listen to. None of the other albums hit me that way, but most of those albums in the first couple years (not so much Countdown to Ecstasy) still felt fun and tight. Then, come Aja, I started to feel lie I was losing focus, and that feeling only got stronger with Gaucho (and then also in the two new albums twenty years later). Maybe I’ll get better at liking those albums, but in this set of listening they started to feel slippery, like I couldn’t get my ears to hold onto them.
That’s exactly the opposite of how I felt when first listening to Can’t Buy a Thrill! The most notable part of that was how easy it was to hold onto it with my ear, how much it felt like there was so much to latch onto. I wrote down in my notes that it reminded me of the best parts of pop-music Fleetwood Mac, but better. I’d been expecting it to fall flat because I feel like the pop/rock genre in the 70s has such a particular feeling that I only ever like so much. The conventions of the time and genre hold it back, a little. But it didn’t fall flat, it rocked! It still sat pretty firmly inside of the feel of the time and genre, but it rocked all the same.
Then, as I listened to Steely Dan start to stretch against the conventions of the time and genre, I started to like them less and not more. It felt like they were drifting farther and farther away from something that would hold my attention. Their sound went from tight and crunchy to feeling very fuzzy and hazy. In their later albums, they do more and more harmonies and chord progressions that are repetitive and predictable—until some funky changeup, but the funky changeup is never crunchy. I want it to be crunchy, I want those changeups to be solid, and I feel like often they are, but not so for Steely Dan. Instead, they’re always, like… I dunno, a glancing blow? I don’t know how to describe it, it’s a very particular feeling. Unsettling, but unsettling is way too strong a word. They don’t even really feel to me like they introduce tension so much as they ignore resolution. I don’t quite love it. Maybe my mind will change, but for now I don’t quite love it.
That kinda fits my vibe, historically, I think. I love the weird and wacky, the artists, the dreamers and the schemers with an ear for something complex and interesting—but I like them the most when they’re doing something kinda basic. That’s not a hard and fast rule, obviously, but I think it’s generally pretty accurate.
Giving a ranking is, again, tough. Lowkey (highkey) so sick of the rankings. Blegh. I’m gonna give a mid-low B. It’s slippery and weird enough feeling in my mind that it definitely doesn’t fit in the As but it’s obviously good and enjoyable enough throughout, with no major hangups, that it would be out of place as a C or D. Then within the B range, a low-mid B is just the most cop-out-y place for it to be, and I guess I’m big into cop-out-iness right now.
Steely Dan complete, now listening to: Cuzco
tunafruitsandwitch 