Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic


$23 Adventure Time, part 3/4

If we were playing the standard Sesame Street game One of These Things Is Not Like The Others, you wouldn't even need to know the fourth album to know that the lower left hand corner is the answer (coincidentally where i seem to fall on the political compass; i'm quite a bit more anarchic than Ghandi). 

Steam Powered Dildo is an awesome name for a band, but ABC is not Bottle of Beef so Becker and Fagan went with Burroughs' name for it, Steely Dan. Here's their 3rd album, Pretzel Logic. It's a 5-star album across the board. The only criticism of the album is that most people don't have a clue what any of it's about, but when has that ever mattered? The point is that this is one of the few jazz-rock albums where no one can find any sort of pretension or insult lurking beneath the surface. They certainly aren't trying to call you an idiot for not "getting it." Jay Black famously likened them to the Charleses Manson and Starkweather. 

I, of course, am a big Skunk Baxter fan, especially when he's going head to head with the saxes or imitating a muted trumpet (seriously, East St. Louis Toodle-oo is amazing), but he certainly isn't stealing the show from anybody else on this album. It all just works so well. Jazz rock is kind of a misnomer. I can't think of a better term for Steely Dan, but this isn't at all like Chicago, or Lighthouse, or the Prog of The Moody Blues or Ponty. 

This is one of those honest albums i mentioned. There's no gimmick here, this sounds like everyone involved said "yep, that's perfect, that's exactly what we wanted to do, and you can't deny it's great."

It doesn't matter if you don't understand it, they feel the monkey in your soul, and how could you possibly call them liars? He's not gonna stop you from buying the more expensive peanuts and chestnuts, be mostly he sells hot fresh pretzels. Buy two pretzels and split the difference, that's Pretzel Logic.

Part 4

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