Steely Dan albums

Their last three albums Gaucho, Two Against Nature and Everything must go are the bottom of the barrel of their catalogue.

I have all their SACDs and a few DVD-A.. Aja is their best but don't forget The Royal Scam, Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied.

Northeast Corridor is crap.

For a real taste of the guys live check out Metal Leg

@lordmelton "Their last three albums Gaucho, Two Against Nature and Everything must go are the bottom of the barrel of their catalogue".  Well, that's certainly an opinion.  I'm sure that many on this site own all the LPs and hold them in high regard. I've always enjoyed Gaucho as much or more than Aja. Two against natures has a few tracks that are as good as anything they've done, IMHO, and Everything must go also has some very good tracks.  The good news is, the bottom of Steely Dan's barrel is still a very high standard.  Cheers.

@bigtwin My reasoning behind my statement is that their first five albums all showed improvement over the previous album, Aja was such a smash that I guess that surprised the band and they had a massive payday. BTW not one of their albums ever reached No.1, Aja reached No.3, Gaucho sold quite well but that was off the back of Aja.

Anyway, the only decent track between those last three albums is ""Third World Man".

"Everything Must Go" sounds like a second rate Donald Fagan album and the musicianship and production on all three is unacceptable.

If you haven't listened to their first five albums , I suggest you do.

However if you like these last three then good luck to you.

I'm belatedly replying to this topic because I was away and only then discovered that Audiogon won't allow you to log in from another country.

Anyway, @lordmelton, I'm not sure what you mean by the assertion that the earlier Steely Dan albums showed a sequential "improvement" one over the other.

Harmonically, Steely Dan's music became progressively more complex over time and moved from the harmonic vocabulary of rock and country towards and into that of jazz, notably from Aja onwards and through the remainder of the Steely Dan record releases. [That's with due acknowledgement to the fact that there are elements of jazz and rock vocabulary on nearly all of the albums].

As someone who is genre agnostic, I personally love all the albums, but comparing something like, say, My Old School to, say, Babylon Sisters is just impossible - apples to turnips etc,

2 of my all time fave albums are Walter Becker's solo stuff. Brilliant songwriting, recording is first class (of course), and simply killer tracks.