RECORD REVIEW

Old freaks never surrender

Whenever an aging art rock band comes out of retirement to tour or record another couple of tracks together, two things happen. First, reviews like this come out of the bloody woodwork; second, everyone claims to smell corporate and anti-artistic greed. But Steely Dan isn’t an aging art rock band – there’s always been something not quite right about any label applied to them. Witness, for example, that jazz and rock purists would far rather claim Steely Dan as their own than concede any kind of crossover reality. So perhaps it’s only fitting that Steely Dan sat out most of the last two decades of corporate-managed, market-driven, artificial hybridity, waiting for another chance to do their own inimitable thing.

And that’s precisely what they’ve done here. Two Against Nature fits almost seamlessly into the Walter Becker-Donald Fagan oeuvre, with light, funky, cooler than ever (but not too cool to have any fun) sounds. And because virtually all of the album is sonically playful, it would be easy to think that the deep pathos of classics like "Deacon Blues" is absent. But the super-smooth storytelling on "What a Shame About Me" develops and entraps an even more low-key approach to the end of grand expectations, and works that same grim deadpan magic.

Not that the Dan is built on pathos alone, either. The portrayal of jerky, self-deluded hubris so strong in "Rikki Don’t Lose That Number" is present here, too, on the album’s title track, reminding us that this band is a strange critter indeed. And all its own.

Even the snarly New Yorker review of this album had trouble saying more than hey, these cats, who were so ahead in their day, are still doing the same thing. But there’s frankly so little of this stuff that another 10 tracks of it amount to a small gold mine, as the refrain line of "Negative Girl" seems to self-consciously recognize: "The original classic thing – more of the same."

Marc Christensen writes about music for Metro Times.