| As should be expected, Steely Dan's four-disc box set isn't like all the other rectangular pop-music retrospectives/tombstones. Not for Messrs. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the typically bloated, ego-jacking crate padded out with childhood recordings, suspect cassette demos, and broken-down session takes, annotated by candid snapshots purloined from some distant relative. Nope, this is simply the Dan Mach 1's complete oeuvre, from the craft-conscious pop of Can't Buy a Thrill to the jazzy torpor of Gaucho, laid out chronologically and neatly compressed into four discs, with not even a handful of "bonus" cuts (a live recording of "Bodhisattva", a 1971 demo of "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" with Flo and Eddie on the side, "Here at the Western World", a Royal Scam outtake, and their obligatory soundtrack cameo, "FM") to colour outside the lines. The liner notes are suitably smart, even if they occasionally strain trying to stay astride of B&F's patent sardonicism. For the aspiring Steely Dan completist, a fine place to start. --Jerry McCulley |
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