Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
As the albums are re-released for the modern era, with a greater sense of occasion and fierce debate attached to them, it is to be delighted to witness the return of Steely Dan to the conscious of the older listener and be appreciated by a younger crowd who weren’t aware of just how ahead of their time they were.
The latest album to receive a 21st Century ear upon it is the remarkable Gaucho, and it is one that further cements the uniqueness of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker and the way they were able to work together to produce a series of albums that culminated, for 20 years, in a final blistering and insanely beautiful piece of art
Whilst Messers Becker and Fagan would return to the studio together for the 2000 release Two Against Nature, and again for a final time under the Steely Dan name, with Everything Must Go, it is arguably in Gaucho that the reign of the pair reached its zenith, and whilst everything between Can’t Buy A Thrill and Aja had a marvellous sense of fulfilment, Gaucho should, and will be seen as an album of definition; almost a perfect book end filled with a temptation of music that captures a new ideal as the 70s in which they inhabited with a generous flavour of experiment and sound turned to a more pragmatic and expansive intricacy.
Whilst there were critics who deemed the album to lack the spontaneity of the previous releases, it should be noted that freedom comes with a price that is heavy and in time can be stifling; occasionally the mind requires a structure that refuses to bend and falter just to show how simple and effortless art can be. Sometimes you must admit the truth…art, like life, can be difficult, an effort, and a toil, and yet the result is often more splendid than anything that went before.
An album that contains tracks such as Hey Nineteen, Third World Man, Babylon Sisters, and Time Out Of Mind, is not going to falter under the pressure that the decades to come would have observed as several new genres would replace the music that dominated the landscape of time to which the pair had come to envision.
A fitting first finale for Steely Dan, and if it had been left there, if the solo careers had been the absolute focus post Gaucho then time would have been assured of how we should appreciate integrity when it is presented to us, and the joy of a decade well spent.
Ian D. Hall