Steely an

Pioneering pop/jazz band Steely Dan, formed by Donald Fagen and Walter Backer in the early '70s, had already secured five U.S. Top 40 albums before the release of Aja in 1977. Aja however, was to prove to be the biggest selling album of Steely Dan's illustrious career, reaching Number 3 on the U.S. Billboard chart, spending a year in the Top 40 there, and also reaching Number 5 in the U.K.Aja was the first British Top 10 hit for Steely Dan and also the first album by Becker and Fagen as a duo.

For about the thousandth time, these very early recordings by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen that have remained officially unreleased for a reason: they're terrible and only vaguely resemble the actual Steely Dan that came years later. This is not to say that there is no merit to them, only very little, and only for those who are so obsessed by the Steely Dan legend they need to hear every bent note, of which there are plenty here. This is another shabby Dressed to Kill effort that should be avoided. Period.

Can't Buy a Thrill became an unexpected hit, and as a response, Donald Fagen became the group's full-time lead vocalist, and he and Walter Becker acted like Steely Dan was a rock & roll band for the group's second album, Countdown to Ecstasy…

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.