Two Against Nature

The release of Two Against Nature is a major musical event. The two are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, and Two Against Nature is the first new studio album in 20 years from Steely Dan. Every previous original studio album from the duo has been certified gold or platinum. It will be only natural for Two Against Nature to catapult Steely Dan back to the top.

Certified Platinum by the RIAA. (3/01)

Never so much a band as the slyly crafted specter of one, Steely Dan's mid-1990s "return" to live performance was as surprising as it was perverse. They'd previously toured only once, round about the era of Watergate, pet rocks, and Shaft. A half-decade after their concert comeback and a mere 19 years after Gaucho seemingly closed out their recording career, the jazz-pop conceit of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen deliberately dropped back into a recording landscape where they weren't so much seasoned vets as alien ambassadors. Two Against Nature, indeed. The tack is instantly familiar: a musical/lyrical reconciliation of Monk and Newman, with familiar harmonic flourishes, nimble studio chops, and an icy, world-class cool, as willfully insulated from hip-hop and techno as it was from disco and Top 40. Less concerned with melodic hooks than a canny sophistication of mood and manner, Becker and Fagen never let a trite melody get in the way of a good story, whether their protagonists are plotting some nefarious obliquity ("Gaslighting Abby"), Southern-fried incest (the deliciously funky "Cousin DuPree"), or bleakly confronting dashed expectations ("What a Shame About Me"). A little more musically languorous perhaps, its trademark cynicism now undercut by hints of sadness and regret, this is nonetheless a Steely Dan album worthy of the name, and like the best of them, one whose subtle charms reveal themselves in surprising ways. -Jerry McCulley