Steely Dan

One of the defining albums of the late 1970s, Aja combines jazz fusion sophistication with sadly cynical observations on modern life. "Peg" was the hit single but "Deacon Blue" gave aging disco hustlers and suburban burnouts "a name when they lose."

Aja Is The Third Steely Dan album since songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen
discarded a fixed-band format in late 1974. Since then they have declined to venture
beyond the insular comfort of L.A. studios, recording their compositions with a loose
network of session musicians. As a result, the conceptual framework of their music has
shifted from the pretext of rock & roll toward a smoother, awesomely clean and... More >

Carola suggests that by now they realize they'll never get out of El Lay, so they've elected to sing in their chains like the sea. After all, to a certain kind of reclusive aesthete, well-crafted West Coast studio jazz is as beautiful as anything else, right? Only I'm no recluse. I hated this record for quite a while before I realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some; I still find the solo licks of Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman, et al. too f*cking tasty, but at least in this context they mean something. I'm also grateful to find Fagen and Becker's collegiate cynicism in decline; not only is "Deacon Blues" one of their strongest songs ever, it's also one of their warmest. Now if only they'd rhymed "I cried when I wrote this song" with "Sue me if I play it wrong," instead of "Sue me if I play too long." Prefering long to wrong could turn into their fatal flaw. (Grade - B+)