Word: fagen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Debbie Fagen...
Byrne is anelusive writer, one moment singing about love and sensations, the next saying something like "be a little more selfish/it might do you some good." Brrrrr. With a voice that is a hybrid of Donald (Steely Dan) Fagen and David Bowie, Byrne has a tendency to sound spacey and detached. He compounds the effect by singing from an appropriately spacey and detached point of view. In nearly every song the singer marvels at some new sensual experience, the problems of life or his friends. His outlook recalls those aliens in "Star Trek" who rhapsodize about the flood of feeling...
Steely Dan crosses the fine line it has been straddling for so long; the band has solidly ventured into jazz, both instrumentally and structurally, although their vocals remain the same. Yet, even the vocals are not totally sacred. Don Fagen's voice is different on Aja; it lacks the gisty rasp; it is cleaner, using harmony where it never did before. The guitar is not nearly as prominent a player as it is in the group's other dramas. The Dan are using horns, electric keyboards, symthesized sounds as well as a distict jazz rhythm for their music...
...Donald Fagen and Walter Becker composed smooth lyrics for Aja, proving you can combine meaningful lines with structural jazz. In "Deacon Blues" they make us privy to the business of their new album...
...handful of bands which can do justice to a rapidly whithering art. But Aja comes across as Steely Dan's "breaking on thru"; their growth is so limitless and their potential so boundless that it way only a matter of time before Aja had to arrive. Becker and Fagen are all that's left of the original Dan. Their everpressing musical curiosity has surfaced and taken hold to produce an album so technically sound it teases the senses to imagine the group's next work...