Steely Dan - Everything Must Go

The original inventors of sophisticated pop come back only three years after their magnificent return which followed a twenty years split, and this time it sounds like all those years have passed, after all...
Two Against Nature was an amazing comeback, they were as good as they never went away, it was just up there at the level of Aja and Gaucho. There were some songs, especially the superb final of the record with Negative Girl and West Of Hollywood, which made you wonder just how could human beings compose that music... were they aliens?
Well, Everything Must Go sounds more, like, human, sounds like a band finally distant from the ambition of the Seventies. It's still an excellent record, especially by anyone else's standards. Of course no one else can sound like this, I'm still convinced the only other one ever coming somewhere close to this quality of instrumental and melodic composition has been Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon, in his own way...
Anyway, by Steely Dan's standards, we were left with the stellar West Of Hollywood closing their last album, so it's a bit surprising listening to the very down to earth blues of The Last Mall as the opening of the new record. We had read the interviews, where they declared they wanted this to be a simpler thing and well, it really is. It's still sophisticated music (and very intelligent lyrics), but a lot simpler, it seems like they wanted to go back to their blues roots in their elder age, though luckily this shouldn't mark the end of their adventure, as the title of the album apparently refers to the recession of the Western economy...

There are still some songs at the level of their more ambitious music, like the touching Things I Miss The Most (like "the Audi TT... the hous on the gulf coast... the '54 Strat"), or Godwhacker ("you better get gone poppie, Godwhacker's on the case"), which sounds a bit like the follow up to Green Earrings... and Walter Becker, who already proved to be a good singer on his excellent solo album, 11 Tracks Of Whack, sings the wonderful Slang Of Ages.
Above all, there's the only song when they're truly at their most ambitious best, Pixeleen ("rave on my sleek and soulful cyberqueen"), which is worth the CD alone, it's really emotional. There's an absolutely excellent central part with a touching duet, when Donald Fagen and Carolyn Leonhart sing together "symmetrical and clean" and the sax comes in you'd really think you're hearing Steely Dan's best album., it doesn't sound like the same record including songs like Blues Beach, which are just plainly pleasant...
Of course you look at todays pop music, and this towers as an absolute masterwork, but you look at what they were able to do three years ago, and wht they did, at their age, on Pixeleen on this very album, and you just know Everything Must Go is a great album, but we can even expect more.

Rating: 8/10