Steely Dan - Katy Lied
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Free Music Notes for Katy Lied
Free Music Review: Sardonic & Stylish
Hit: 5 Stars
Katy Lied exemplifies the Steely Dan mantra- acerbic (Black Friday), maybe even creepy (Everyone's Gone To The Movies) lyrics that confound even the staunchest Dan fan (Rose Darling) combined with lush (Bad Sneakers), beautiful (Doctor Wu), thoughtful (Your Gold Teeth II) music. This makes Steely Dan an acquired taste, but it's this dichotomy that makes Becker and Fagen the underrated geniuses they are.
Although neither Walter nor Donald liked the sound of the album, this ranks as perhaps their best album.
Free Music Review: A glittering gem with shadows around it
Hit: 5 Stars
If you appreciate the precision, beauty, incisiveness, and atmosphere Steely Dan conjures, this is for you. Albums don't get any finer than this.
A skilled actor knows that tears withheld are far more poignant than buckets cried, and this work shows the same beautiful, painful restraint. Each track can stand alone in this dark short-story collection, but when this CD is viewed as a whole, you're immersed in Steely Dan's parallel world of the singular loner. The instrumentals are perfect, and Fagen's voice is at its alternately cool and urgent best. As intimate and bittersweet as this music is, we're not left to appreciate just the vignettes and melodies because the craftsmanship is there too, once you manage to think past the tales and reflect on what lays behind them.
New SD fans will find this CD delivers swift understanding of SD's realm, while old time fans will count this as the heart of their collection.
Sometimes you listen to a work and understand that it represents the artist's efforts to connect to the audience. This isn't like that. This is inner thoughts simply put out there, and is why it's Steely Dan at their purest, just being without regard to marketability or hit potential. Making this work was probably an act of faith, knowing that people who needed to get it would.
Free Music Review: Their Best
Hit: 5 Stars
Steely Dan never made a bad album/CD, period. This is their best. If just for the bass riff in Gold Teeth, you need this CD. The level of muscianship has never been surpassed. The level of sophistication and insight is in a class by itself. The unbelievable quest for perfection that these two guys were on is unique in the pop music world, and I feel that the pinacle was Katy Lied. You can never get tired of this CD, it is timeless and absolutely amazing. Free Music Review: #1?!
Hit: 4 Stars
Back in 2002 it was something of a shock to me when Joe S. Harrington listed this album as number one on his Top 100 albums, and many people to whom I have recommended that brilliantly-written list have had the same opinion.
It is true that Steely Dan were, before the overrated Aja and Gaucho, an exceptionally consistent band. Their first five albums set a standard for cerebral lyricism and storytelling that has never been equalled in the popular music canon, and they could not only write with intelligence but also explore extremely dark and difficult topics, as on their brilliant trilogy on Countdown to Ecstasy of "Show Biz Kids", "My Old School" and "King of the World". Their musicianship was also a treat, and Katz's production has held up remarkably well after over thirty years.
"Katy Lied", though, is probably the least brilliant of the Dan's first five albums, certainly containing more tunes not wholly memorable than the other four, like "Your Gold Teeth II", which may have been cute in its first incarnation but is rather a "throwaway" here if ever one could come from them. The opener "Black Friday" may have been loosely copied (effectively, actually) by Tori Amos for God but still is a really fine song with brilliant lyrics about the 1929 Wall Street and a powerful, catchy tune.
The rest of "Katy Lied", is quite different from "Black Friday": psychedelic in texture, often dreamy and soft. "Bad Sneakers" "Doctor Wu", "Throw Back The Little Ones" and "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)" are the best songs from this group, and the lyrics really evoke so many scary images as to draw the listener in. "Bad Sneakers"' chorus is the best example of this: Fagen's image of loneliness is so subtle as to make it deep, and the chorus makes it as catchy as can be.
"Rose Darling", which should have been a hit, is a better love song than "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" with some passages that predate what the Dan were to do to better effect on The Royal Scam's underappreciated title track a year later.
All in all, even if this is the least essential of the Dan's classic initial quintet of albums, "Katy Lied" is still very much worth owning.
Free Music Review: Fabulous album
Hit: 4 Stars
"Bad Sneakers" and "Doctor Wu" are definitely my favorite tracks in this fabulous album. A Steely Dan classic...