I think if ever a track gets played a lot on the radio, it’s Reeling In The Years, for some reason. And perhaps because of that, I wasn’t massively looking forward to this album, it’s not a track that really does a lot for me. Perhaps because it is this very radio-friendly early Seventies rock that borrows bits from country, from rock, from R&B and from jazz but comes out not very much like anything.
Anyone remember as a child mixing all the different colours of Plasticene together in the hopes that you’d get a glorious rainbow, but all you end up with is a blob of brown? I was pondering if this is the musical equivalent of the “Brown Plasticene” effect. Maybe. But to be fair, when you properly listen to the mix of these songs, there’s a lot more going on than appears on a casual listen.
The other popular radio number is Do It Again, which is based around Latin rhythms, feeling a little like Santana without the distinctive guitar work. Comparisons to CSNY output is inevitable as well, but if anything the tracks are closer to Stephen Stills’ work since they tend to borrow from jazz and soul a bit more. I realised at the end who they really reminded me of, especially Reeling In The Years – very much like Thin Lizzy.
The main songwriter and vocalist, Donald Fagen, is a keyboard player which I think lends a certain tonality to the songs; his co-writer is the bassist Donald Becker and occasional credits to David Palmer, who is co-lead vocalist. Thus, unusually, the guitarist(s) Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Danny Dias don’t do any songwriting. This mix, I think, is why the songwriting style is subtly different to the guitarist/vocalist driven songwriting of the similar acts.
Away from the hits, the tracks are pretty interesting, albeit largely in the same kind of melange of styles. Kings and Turn That Heartbeat Over Again were both ones that stuck with me, but for me the album didn’t land as well as it could. I suspect that if I listened again and got to know it, I’d appreciate some of the tracks more, because there’s a lot of complex musical interweaving going on in them that isn’t always immediately obvious. For now, however, it was a bit Brown Plasticene.
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