Steely Dan – Katy Lied – LP – MFSL US 1978 Repress

Essentially, Katy Lied is a smoother version of Pretzel Logic, featuring the same cross-section of jazz-pop and blues-rock. True Wise Guy says that “Katy Lied serves as the Dan’s first foray into the icy jazz rock that would go on to define their sound and serve as the basis for 1977’s mega-popular Aja, which would both invent “yacht-rock”, and establish the band as a veritable titan among their field. The pop-music hating duo from Bard College who ironically became instant pop stars upon the release of 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill strike a delicate balance between the California singer-songwriter instincts of their early work and a latent passion for jazz, torturing session musicians with sprawling lead sheets and intricate chord changes, but nothing here ever feels too constrained, too restricted by Becker and Fagen’s notorious perfectionism. Session musicians were hired in platoons, each song ran through dozens of times and yet this album still sounds effortless. “Black Friday” whips itself into a frenzy right from the needle drop as Fagen dreams of a mad dash to New Zealand while businessmen dive from office buildings in droves, and yet something in Fagen’s voice leads you to believe that even he doesn’t want to embrace this anarchy. Katy Lied is both a deeply cynical and a deeply lonely album, our characters are abandoned in sprawling Los Angeles on “Bad Sneakers” or left strung-out in New York on the album’s thesis, “Katy Lied”, as saxophone licks and guitar riffs swirl around them. Our narrators are reaching out for the bottle, the dope bag, or the hand of their absent lover. Fagen evokes a pianist at an empy-cocktail bar, belting in his familiar limited range over shimmering piano chords with a longing hopefulness that defies the sound of other albums in the group’s discography, except maybe Gaucho, which similarly capitalizes on the feeling that the world is out to get you and only you. The strength of Katy Lied is in its ability to sum up essential human feelings of alienation and malcontent with a craftsmanship and vital sneer that other artists may lack. Material and emotions that may seem cliche or hackneyed blossom, and as the album fades to black, the feelings it conjures up do not.”

Tracklist

Listen here via youtube

My Vinyl Revolution is an online Music Distributor selling New Reissue Vinyl from around the world as well as Second Hand Vintage Records in Australia and globally.