Designated Cheerleader: Two Against Nature by Steely Dan
An essay in defense of Steely Dan's triumphant comeback album Two Against Nature
You are summoned forthwith to pay homage to the one true king
I had never even seen a shooting star before. 29 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Steely Dan were hunched over their instruments. Donald Fagen slowly beat on a Wurlitzer piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Walter Becker tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Steely Dan's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.
The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Teddy's rolling now most every night/Skatin' backwards at the speed of light," Fagen sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe.
The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Rikki!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Jack of Speed," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Kid Charlemagne"? I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Steely Dan had the heavens on their side.
For further testameChipmy brother and I both suffered diaper accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Deacon Blues" in our respective playrooms. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my mom's car, just as I'd feared passing the bars of my crib after getting my arm stuck between them in 1996. With good reason, I suspect Steely Dan to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Two Against Nature-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Steely Dan themselves, will be considered.
Even the heralded Pretzel Logic has been nudged down one spot in Valhalla. Two Against Nature makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as "rock" (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it's jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don't come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world. Ransom, the philologist hero of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet who is kidnapped and taken to another planet, initially finds his scholarship useless in his new surroundings, and just tries to survive the beautiful new world.
This is an emotional, psychological experience. Two Against Nature sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Steely Dan hated being Steely Dan, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Steely Dan record yet.
"Gaslighting Abbie" opens like Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs. As your ears decide whether the tones are coming or going, Donald Fagen's Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue. "Flame is the game," Yorke belts in uplifting sighs. The first-person mantra of "The game we call Gaslighting Abbie" is repeated until the line between Fagen's mind and the listener's mind is erased.
Skittering toy boxes open the album's title song, which, like the track "Almost Gothic," shows a heavy Warp Records influence. The vibraphone lullaby lulls you deceivingly before the riotous "West of Hollywood." Mean, pristine bass shapes the spine as unnerving saxophone choirs limn. Smooth brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Fagen screams, begs, "I almost got there!" It's the album's shrill peak, but just one of the incessant goosebumps raisers.
After the rockets exhaust, Steely Dan float in their lone orbit. "What a Shame About Me" boils down "The Caves of Altamira" and "Dr. Wu" to their spectral essence. The Wurlitzer-laden ballad comes closest to bridging Fagen's lyrical sentiment to the instrumental effect. "I said 'Babe you look delicious, and you're standing very close/But, like, this is Lower Broadway and you're talking to a ghost," he sings in his trademark sneer. The brass melts and weeps as the album shifts into its underwater mode. "Negative Girl," an ambient soundscape similar in sound and intent to Side B of Bowie and Eno's Low, calms after the record's emotionally strenuous first half.
The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Cousin Dupree" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs. The lyrics seemingly taunt, "Maybe it's the skeevy look in your eyes, or that your mind has turned to applesauce," before revealing the more resigned sentiment, "But what is it exactly turns you off?" For an album reportedly "lacking" in traditional Steely Dan moments, this is the best summation of their former strengths. The track erodes into a light jam before morphing into "Negative Girl." "Her skin, like milk, it's like she's never seen the sun," Fagen cries over clean, uneasy arpeggios. The ending flares with tractor beams as Fagen is vacuumed into nothingness. The aforementioned "Two Against Nature" clicks and thuds like Aphex Twin and Bjork's Homogenic, revealing brilliant new frontiers for the "band." For all the noise to this point, it's uncertain entirely who or what has created the music. There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin. This is part of the unique thrill of experiencing Two Against Nature.
Pulsing organs and a stuttering snare delicately propel "Janie Runaway." Fagen's breath can be heard frosting over the rainy, gray jam. Words accumulate and stick in his mouth like eye crust. "You be the showgirl, I'll be Sinatra" he mumbles while Jon Harington squirts whale-chant feedback from his guitar. The closing "West of Hollywood" brings to mind The White Album, as it somehow combines the sentiment of Lennon's LP1 closer-- the ode to his dead mother, "Julia"-- with Ringo and Paul’s maudlin, yet sincere LP2 finale, "Goodnight." Pump organ and tenor sax flutter as Fagen condones with affection, "Sadly for us, our little talk is over." To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album's overall theme, Fagen bows out with "I'm way deep into nothing special", If you're not already there with him.
The experience and emotions tied to listening to Two Against Nature are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 52 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that thrity men and women (Amy Helm included) created this, it's clear that Steely Dan must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.
Dismissed