8) Steely Dan - Aja


Steam Powered Dildo invented Yacht Rock? The Motels was "on the nose?" Seriously, Sandra, you're gonna give me a heart attack trying cram all of this into one bottle. Okay, Steely Dan made a because Japan album. Sandra's making that 'splaining eyebrow, so i better make like Lucy. I just mean that Japan takes it's corporate capitalism very serious. The best, the newest, the marketable. Your value as a person is mostly interchangeable with your value to your company. Obviously, i have some deeply ingrained prejudices against that, so i set them aside for this album, which would otherwise be considered overproduced by Swiss watchmaker standards. Enough, get on with it. 

Here's one of the 8 seminal Yacht Rock albums, one of the top test records for audio equipment due to it's immaculate production, it's Aja. No, you're pronouncing it wrong, it's pronounced "Asia." Jeez, even the title is obtuse. 

Here's the thing about Steely Dan, they are hard core ironic anti-heros, their characters rival Jethro Tull for unsavory, their songs are always about booze, porn, crime, manipulation; the surface is all glitz and shimmer, but the underbelly is seedy as all get out. I think we all recognize those characteristics in Mz. D, don't we? Not sure exactly which one she was is real life, but it's the lifestyle she's lamming, removing the source of the problem. 

Guilty as charged on that one [wink]. 

Shrapnel in your eye? Afraid you went overboard? My real question is how does this fit with the new sincerity of west coast beach bathers? They were perfectly happy to not have a manager and not sell millions of records. Oh, now that i say it like that, i get it. Ok, i'm good now. It is a pretty spectacular album. My third eye is blind this time, how's the last album of Sandra's Sojourn going to be?

Part 9

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more