STEELY DAN — Gaucho (review)

STEELY DAN — Gaucho album cover Album · 1980 · RnB Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
innervisions
I love this one AND CTE about the same. In fact, I like this a bit more. Strange, huh! I guess my appreciation for the jazz side of rock or jazz music generally along with prog rock and art rock accounts for it.

This is the 'pop'-iest, slickest, most polished Steely Dan effort. It gets almost too polished for even a lot of the fans. Add to that their early experiments with digital recording technology, and the whole album has a very studied and deliberate feeling about it which as a rule puts off rock and jazz heads alike.

But what of the compositions? Well, I'll be damned if they don't mostly rock. My least favourite is in fact the much talked about 'Mark Knopfler' track 'Time out of Mind', which I find rather lightweight and insubstantial next to the rest of the material. I love all of the rest unconditionally and honestly believe the album contains some of the best work of the band.

Babylon Sisters generally gets a good deal of love universally and so does the Third World Man solo but the one I like most is Glamour Profession, a creepy, murky piece of music that looks at the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood. A lot of listeners dislike this very sleazy aspect of the music and find it off putting because it's like nothing else Steely Dan had done up to the point and lacks rock and roll oomph. But the music is perfect for the subject matter and works superbly in conjunction with the lyrics. A more straight ahead rocker would probably be more appealing to listen to but I wonder if, at least within the boundaries of Steely Dan's style, it would capture the mood as well as Glamour Profession?

That applies to the album as such. The material oozes with murky cynicism and the music echoes it brilliantly. Songs like Hey Nineteen sound as if they lack the usual Dan hooks until you examine it from this perspective and find that it's quite intentionally designed to throw you off because it reflects the confusion and disillusionment in the lyrics and quite possibly in the lives of the songwriting duo too. To that end, the overproduced feeling too is apt because that is exactly what it is supposed to capture. Too much gloss and lavishness leaving the recipient with an empty feeling.

I'd have to dock it half a star for Time Out of Mind which is not quite good enough to warrant a masterpiece rating for the whole album but as such, this is one of the worthiest albums made by this great band.
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