Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

To look back at an album, at any piece of art, and declare it to be prophetic, is to ascribe meaning to a moment uttered and echoed though out time by our own perceived belief of how the world has turned out.

Yet, with that said, future insight is a skill of mindful endurance, of being able to assign certain scenarios to current news item and allowing the imagination to flow unabated by personal feeling to produce what could be the eventuality, the final piece of the puzzle and presenting in such a way that it has the voyeur of the art being committed to open suggestion that it was always meant to be.

To compare Steely Dan’s second album, Countdown To Ecstasy to the novel 1984 could be seen as a preposterous notion, and yet the spark of the conscious suggests that there is more in common than gained at first dismissal, both George Orwell and the remarkable players that set the standard of the genre even higher in their debut recording, the outstanding Can’t Buy A Thrill, have in their locker is the ability to understand the natural conclusion of a moment if left unchecked. That prophecy is only the adaption of the projection we seek, and in the themes explored in Steeley Dan’s sophisticated sophomore outing, the idea of being far-sighted is no less an illusion as it is foretelling.

The countdown to ecstasy sees Walter Becker and Donald Fagen lean more heavily into their own experiences and by doing so opens the floodgates of illumination on how they were thinking of the future of the American Dream, one blighted by torturous excess, one that sees the persuasion of being determined to rise above as a mockery to those left behind, that the class system so hated and derided when the country things of Britain, was in danger of becoming an entrenched, but more subversive, desire in American family life.

With hindsight anything can be ascribed to the blueprint of prophecy, but it takes genius to showcase it as beauty and entertaining art, and that is the flavour of contentment as Steely Dan’s album plays out, as tracks such as The Boston Rag, Your Gold Teeth, My Old School, the emotional despair framed elegantly within King Of The World, and the opening title track and critically empowering Bodhisattva leave their substantial mark.

Whilst not in the same class as its illustrious predecessor, Countdown To Ecstasy is important as an exercise of not producing the same album twice just for the sheer need of success, it is an album that requires deeper thought, greater levels of concentration, arguably even less bombastic nature, but it is the understanding of a generational spokesperson that allows their thoughts to be unhindered by the prospect of riches.

Sublime, intelligent, fierce, Steely Dan’s Countdown To Ecstasy is deliriously visionary and musically inspiring.

Ian D. Hall