Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen has lost his touch

The once-masterful Steely Dan member Donald Fagen’s latest is a far cry from classics like Aja.

If you’ve lived most of your life believing you’re too cool for Steely Dan, I pity you. There may not be any band that better amalgamates the precision of jazz with the freewheeling universality of rock ‘n’ roll.

This duality of the tight and the unkempt, the rough and the smooth and the knotty and the basic made albums such as 1977’s Aja irreplaceable icons during a pivotal era in music history.

Now, though, things feel a bit too hollow and nostalgic. Sunken Condos may be a new record by Steely Dan singer and pianist Donald Fagen, but you’d be hard pressed to figure out what truly is “new” here.

It mostly radiates like reluctant deduction, the sound of an artist stuck in the past but not buoyed by his peers and bandmates in the present. Gone is the boogie-oogie bass playing of Walter Becker. Gone is the velvet noodling of indispensable guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. Gone are the cool-cat samba touches from drummer Jeff Porcaro. There’s only Fagen and frail cardboard cutouts of his prior musical counterparts.

Take opening track “Slinky Thing.” It has all the hallmark elements of a Steely Dan song: jazzy piano, weather-channel guitar, gratuitous usage of the word “dude,” Fagen’s recognizable brandy croon, a chorus of female backup singers — except something is undeniably missing.

In other places, Fagen invokes specific Steely Dan songs of the past. “Miss Marlene” has that bluesy “Pretzel Logic” strut, but it lacks the lyrical imagery of its older counterpart. And “Good Stuff” shimmies like a bleached version of the much dirtier “Night By Night,” but Fagen comes across like the antithesis of slimy here.

If there’s anything positive to say about Sunken Condos, it’s that Fagen’s voice sounds pristine. On standout first single “I’m Not the Same Without You,” it barely seems as though Fagen’s aged a day, which is comforting to us Steely Dan aficionados. Yet everything else, from the overly dull instrumentals that feel like stock settings on a vintage Casio keyboard to the lyrics themselves, is a massive disappointment.

On the bright side, we’ll always have the classics. But Sunken Condos proves Fagen, at 64, may be creatively out of gas once and for all.

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