While listening to this album there was a nagging sense in the back of my mind of another track (from the Eighties) that it reminded me of. I could vaguely remember the tune, but for the life of me couldn’t bring to mind the name of the artist. It suddenly came to me the following morning out of nowhere – Matt Bianco, in particular Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed. It’s that blend of rockabilly, jazz, and pop that sounds quite similar to many of the tracks on this album.
I referred to the previous Steely Dan album as “brown plasticene”, that sense that if you combine too many disparate exciting elements what you get is a somewhat disappointing blandness instead. This album, I think, is a lot better. Possibly there are fewer ingredients per song and so each one works more cleanly as a track, possibly the band has just got better at the blending process, I’m not exactly sure.
The Matt Bianco sound is clear from the very first track, Boddhisatva, that features a rock and roll/rockabilly basis over which the twin guitars of Donny Dias and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter do some jazz soloing. Your Gold Teeth is a funky jazz number that calls to mind Grateful Dead, here the keyboards of Donald Fagen do more of the solo work. And like the Dead, there’s a lot of space in the songs for jamming; the album feels at times like it was written specifically to be played live.
The musical reflections don’t end there. The Latin beats of tracks like Razor Boy and Show Biz Kids reminds one of Santana, another band given to lengthy jams and jazzy soloing, and I’d say for sure that here Steely Dan hold their own against the Dead and Santana, taking what has gone before and updating it with a more sophisticated sound.
And although the music tends towards the relaxing or easy bop, the lyrics tend towards the dark and cynical. Like a lot of early Seventies songs, they skewer materialism, the emptiness of fame (the Razor Boy of the song of that name can take away material happiness in a moment, for example), the overlooked of society (Pearl Of The Quarter is a love song addressed to a prostitute, the singer over-romanticising the object of his desire). Boddhisatva pokes fun at shallow spiritualism, another jab at the left-over hippy sensibilities that think that happiness can be found in a hollow approximation of Eastern philosophy.
This album is definitely better than brown plasticene. And I’m really glad that I remembered Matt Bianco.
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