Against Nature

Marc Almond, Jeremy Reed, Othon - Against Nature (2015) {Marc Almond ANCD1}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 289 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 136 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 16 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 Marc Almond | ANCD1
Acoustic / Alternative / Chanson / Neo-Classical / Adult Alternative Pop

We’ve got a real treat here for Marc Almond fans – the last of his very limited edition Against Nature collaboration with Jeremy Reed and Othon. Against Nature is said to be the seminally decadent novel of 19th Century fin de siècle Paris. It explores the central character of Des Esseintes who, as Jeremy Reed explains lived, “a life governed by deviated aesthetic obsessions and the desire to subvert…. nature through artificial pursuits. Endemically bored, wealthy, disillusioned, acutely refined, phobic and neurotic and singularly disgusted by humanity he withdraws from Paris as a middle-aged sensualist to live with servants as a recluse”.

Sure, Steely Dan are a decade or two late in delivering Two Against Nature, their follow-up to 1980's Gaucho. But time may finally be on the side of rock's most illustrious music geeks. The old knock on Steely Dan was that they were too good for their own good — if Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had recorded a studio album during rock's extended Amateur Hour of the early Nineties, they might have been publicly flogged. Unlike their El Lay-based muso contemporaries, Steely Dan managed to mix their craft with some truly crazy shit — slick-sounding songs about perverts, assassins, divorcees and other non-strangers. We should have expected no less from a band named after a dildo, albeit a hugely literary one.

Notorious for shunning concert performances, Steely Dan's improbable live reunion in the mid-'90s eventually turned into a full-fledged reunion album. Since Steely Dan fans went two decades without even the hope of a new record, the very prospect was a delight, but it was also a little worrying, since a botched comeback would tarnish the band's legacy. Fortunately, Two Against Nature is as seductive and alluring as the best of Steely Dan's later work, with a similar emphasis on classy atmosphere and groove.