Gigomaphone

After living, breathing, digesting and possibly even excreting their landmark album, ‘Aja’ (1977) over a period of several months last year, I was unsure about taking the follow-on step to ‘Gaucho’. Aja, for the uninitiated, is an unashamedly jazz-rock-’of-it’s-era’ album, resplendent with enough virtuoso session musos to poke several large sticks at several large things. There are a few moments on the album that young Gen-Y whippersnappers would scoff at and maybe even deride because they sound like something you might hear on midweek AM radio.

In the early 80s.

To some, myself included, that’s a good thing and in the case of ‘Aja’, it would have been damned near exceptional early 8os AM radio, such is the musical polish and, more importantly, depth of that album.

Steely Dan music has always been music played by people who know how to play their instruments, even if that does include a soaringly dated saxophone. But all things in context.

‘Gaucho’, expands this glossy universe. Whereas ‘Aja’ was tight as a drum and sounded beautiful, there was still some grit in amongst the golden syrup brass sections. ‘Gaucho’ is all tight and beautiful and there’s precious little grit. This is burnished to within an inch of it’s musical integrity because just a bit more spit and polish and this could have tipped over into self-parody. Pleasingly, they stopped where they did.

‘Gaucho’, the title evidently a tribute to Keith Jarratt, is the crystalline sound of early cocaine LA, all Santa-Anna winds and red-orange dusk over the city. It is an entirely evocative album; it’s hard to imagine such a finely polished collection could trigger the imagination but it does, and does with emphasis. There’s no track on here that jumps out specifically, as they all seem to traffic along in a cohesive, sheened whole.

I didn’t really take to this album at first. I could still hear ‘Aja’ everytime I played it and the opener, ‘Babylon Sisters’ just sounded derivative. After awhile, I came to accept that it is, indeed, derivative but it’s this quality that makes it strong. ‘Gaucho’ draws on an already excellent body of music and it’s only uniqueness is that it’s without doubt the most glistening of the Steely Dan canon.

I like it a lot.

Aja 5/5

Gaucho 4/5