Ian MacDonald, New Musical Express,
9 March 1974
A fine record. And that sentence goes first because the fact that a band as perfectly poised as Steely Dan can reach their third album without apparently causing more than a ripple on the surface of the British rock public’s awareness is a disturbing phenomenon that demands flags flown against its continued persistence.
After all, with The Band locked up in label-swapping, Dylan-hopping and nostalgia-dropping, where else can a deafened connoisseur get his shots of lyric succinctness matched with thoroughly coherent musicality? The Dan’s brand of ruthless cool is so vital to rock right now that we can’t afford to leave things like Pretzel Logic solely in the hands of discerning cliques in the import shops.
So don’t.
And now, extending the backward progress of this admittedly slightly crazed review, we go from the conclusion to the premise.
Pretzel Logic is a pretty surprising piece of work, considering the development discernible from Can’t Buy A Thrill to Countdown To Ecstasy.
Thrill was recorded soon after the group formed and sticks closely to Becker and Fagen’s song-arrangement concept, keeping guitarists Dias and Baxter on a fairly tight rein. On Ecstasy the numbers are chordally simpler, more open and less orientated to the instrumental ‘fill’ techniques and timbre effects of the initial outing. Solos are longer and lyrics generally less opaque – even subservient to the maintenance of the groove the band obviously hit through live experience.
Pretzel Logic unexpectedly about-faces the trend towards spaciousness and single-line thinking. On the new album, Becker and Fagen have pulled in the reins once more, produced ten of their most commercial songs yet and constrained their twin-guitar virtuosi to become part of the overall picture again, on several numbers beefing up the sound with additional horns and strings.
As if it was a natural consequence, the words have returned to the hermetic, collegiate inscrutability of the majority of Can’t Buy A Thrill, and I haven’t yet listened to them enough to penetrate what the LP’s about lyrically.
On the other hand, I may not get around to that for some time, since the tunes and settings are so maturely attractive and the performances so impressive that they satisfy on their own.
Try, for example, the opening cut ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’, a sepia-tone bossa-nova by ‘Razor Boy’ out of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Tom Thumb’. Poignant Fagen vocals haunt the verse before the full harmony team swings in on an irresistible chorus. A hit single, if this was a half-reasonable world – as would be ‘Barrytown’, a Dylanesque filtering of McCartney’s ‘Tell Me What You See’ that skilfully skirts the schmaltz of such as ‘Midnite Cruiser’ and the David Palmer tracks on Thrill without losing any sweetness.
Then there’s the tough, stuck-in precision-funk of ‘Night By Night’ and ‘Monkey In Your Soul’; the reflective grace of ‘Any Major Dude Will Tell You’ and ‘Through With Buzz’ and the skeletal nakedness of ‘Charlie Freak’ and the title-song (which is nearly a straightforward blues).
Rounded off with distant jazz echoes on ‘Parker’s Band’ and Duke Ellington’s ‘East St Louis Toodle-Oo’, Pretzel Logic exhibits far more range, depth and flexibility than its forebears and hopefully points to a fourth album that will come within striking distance of standards set by The Band and Big Pink – without infringing in any way on the sound or cultural roots of Robertson’s combo.
This is, after all, slick, Big City music, not grainy rural wood-shedding and, although the two groups have a certain fastidious understatement in common, their ultimate concerns could hardly be more different.
Providing they can hold it together (which depends largely upon how Dias and Baxter take to being manoeuvred by the two songwriters), Steely Dan must surely make their breakthrough to the wider audience soon and, sometime in the future, cut one of rock’s definitive albums.
Pretzel Logic is a big step in that direction and you’d be well-advised to pick up on it now.