Album of the Day 5/9/11
Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #631:
Steely Dan – Katy Lied
Let’s stay in 1975 for another day, huh? This is self-mythologizing, deviously literate jazz-funk from Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and a cast of studio pros. Great band, but practically every one of their albums has a real clunker to go along with the good stuff, so that’s why we picked this one.There’s only a couple of super standouts here – Any World That I’m Welcome To, where Fagen lets down his guard and bares his fangs at the morons he grew up with, and the absolutely macabre Black Friday – but it’s solid all the way through. Bad Sneakers is a spot-on period piece, a couple of losers “with a transistor radio and a whole lot of money to spend” making their way up Sixth Avenue past Radio City. Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More works an oldschool blues vernacular better than any of the band’s contemporaries could, while Chain Lightning goes in a slow, funkier direction. Rose Darling and Everyone’s Gone to the Movies offer a leering, cynical look at romance, the surreal Dr. Wu was a pseudo-hit, and Your Gold Teeth II and the closing track, Throw Back the Little Ones reach for a distant, offhand menace. Here’s a random torrent via Walrussongs.
Song of the Day 2/8/09
Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Sunday’s is #535:
Steely Dan – Any World That I’m Welcome To
“…is better than the one that I come from.” Brooklyn may know the charmer under Donald Fagen, but it also knows the contemptuous outsider who obviously didn’t feel very at home there and wrote this somewhat plaintive, uncharacteristically straightforward piano ballad about it. And for good reason: this was 1975 and the borough was in many respects as provincial as rural Alabama. For that matter, parts of it still are: ask someone from Williamsburg. From the album Katy Lied; also available wherever there are mp3s.
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