Week 14 of 52 albums for a year
Steely Dan - Gaucho
Hi everybody
Another week has come and gone, and with that, another album. This week I delved into something my friend Sean recommended called Gaucho by Steely Dan.
It's got some parts I really liked and some others that were a bit less memorable, at least for my ears. I didn't dive into the lyrics really, I could hear bits of them, but I haven't really gone through and focused on the lyrics. Maybe I'm doing old Steely Dan a disservice by doing that. From what I can gather the lyrics are a huge part of this bands appeal, and while some things I could easily hear and understand, I think a lot of it went over my head.
So look in all fairness, I'm going to open this website, and see if it gives me a bit more background as I go through each track. I should mention that while I haven't understood all the words, there's some songs which even I have been able to pick up are about drug use and sex with young women.
Anyway, on to the album.
The first song, Babylon Sisters, I loved straight away. It's got a great bass line and a really cool vibe. There's a subtle rhythm accentuated by the keys in the chorus that I just love and keep wanting to turn up when I hear it. As an album opener, it had me hooked. Going by the lyrics, and people's breakdown of them, it's a song about either trying to date 2 young girls or hook up with 2 young prostitutes.
Hey Ninteen is ok, it's just a bit bland to my ears. I don't hate it, but I don't really remember it. There's nothing in the song that really perks up my ears. It bops along, it's got an ok sound to it, but it's not memorable to me. Lyrically, it's unsurprisingly about an older man pining after a younger woman who he can't relate to.
Glamour Profession is one that from the start I liked. It's got a catchy but soft feel to it, and has a lot of drug references throughout it, I mean it says illegal fun under the sun throughout the song so it's not too hard to pick that part up. It has references that I don't understand though, and reading through the lyric breakdown, it seems to be subtly pointing towards a lot of corruption that was happening back when this album came out with people in Hollywood.
Gaucho is another song I don't mind but I don't love. It's soft, gentle, and a bit cheesy, with a sax melody starting us off. I read about Steely Dan's music being described as Yacht Rock, and I think this is a good example of this. Lyrically, it seems to be about a bisexual relationship between some kind of Hollywood agent/manager.
Time Out of Mind is one that I liked early on. It's got a disco beat and it's catchy, but as with a lot of this album, it's a bit soft and tame. It's very produced, very clean and polished, and for me, I feel like it's lacking a lot of the raw energy that I am drawn to generally in music. Lyrically, well this is a song about drug use. I don't know all of the references, but the chorus beginning with tonight when I chase the dragon, combined with Walter Beckers drug use which led to his girlfriend overdosing and dying in his house, it's not surprising. There's probably a secondary lyrical angle, but it seems pretty overt from first glance.
My Rival has a catchy start, and I really love how the bass guitar and the palm muted guitar work together, but it's just too clean. It's catchy, it sounds similar to Parliament's We Want The Funk but it doesn't have the same kind of cool vibe and atmosphere. I guess you could say it's disco rather than funk, it's polished rather than raw.
Third World Man has a nice sound to it, there's some atmosphere to this song that I quite like. It's not upbeat and happy, it sounds quite sad and it really grabs me. It's interesting that this was actually recorded during a different session to Gaucho, but they ended up losing a song and scrambled to find something to add to this album. Lyrically, no one is sure. Is it a song about a vetran with PTSD? Is it instead a song about a shooter that's closer to the film Taxi Driver? I dunno, I do like this song though.
As I read about the recording process on wiki, I learned that recording this album was a feat of endurance. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the 2 main guys in Steely Dan, went through at least 42 different session musicians over the 2 years they recorded this album. They did more than 55 attempts on the final mix for the 50 second fade out at the end of Babylon Sister. The song Gaucho had 46 different drum takes, and it didn't matter how tight the other instruments were during those takes, they were only keeping the drum takes.
So all in all, how do I rate this album? It's got some songs I like, but nothing I'd say I love. If I skipped half of it and threw 3 or 4 songs onto a playlist, that would probably scratch any future itches to listen to it.
With this in mind, I think I'll give it 2.5 fingers out of 5. I like 4 out of the 7 songs, so over half of this album I liked, but I don't love any of it. There's nothing here that really scratches an itch and makes me want to put the same song on over and over. Closest would be the rhythm part in the chorus of Babylon Sisters, which I really do enjoy, but it's not enough to tip the rating higher.
So if you're gonna listen to any of this, give the first song a shot. I don't think 'yacht rock' is my thing, but I'm glad I gave it a listen through.
The year so far: