Countdown to Ecstasy |
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Released: July 6, 1973 Peak: 35 US, -- UK, 49 CN, -- AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 0.5 US Genre: rock |
Tracks:Song Title [time] (date song first charted, chart peaks)
All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Total Running Time: 40:46 The Players:
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Rating: 4.112 out of 5.00 (average of 28 ratings)
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the AlbumSteely Dan’s founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, “honed their skills working as staff songwriters at ABC Records, but forming their own band gave them a free hand to let their musical imaginations run riot. Their debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, included two major hit singles, ‘Do It Again’ and ‘Reelin’ in the Years’” TB and pushed the album to platinum success.The band lost vocalist David Palmer, putting “Fagen’s intellectual sneer moved front and center, proving to be a better vehicle for the band’s scathingly acerbic critiques of the U.S.A.’s foibles.” TB The group’s sophomore album, Countdown to Ecstasy, failed to generate a top-40 hit but what it “lacks in hits is more than compensated for in sophistication.” TB The album “expand[s] the scope of the band’s material.” RD It is “a riskier album, musically speaking, than its predecessor.” AM It “introduces more of the jazz influences and oblique lyrics that define their later work.” RD The album’s “eight songs are rich with either musical or lyrical detail that their album rock or art rock contemporaries couldn’t hope to match.” AM “The swing-meets-heavy-metal-groove of Bodhisattva” TB “is a beauty. A satirical blast at karma-conscious California, the song plays like high-IQ rockabilly, the highlight an outrageous lead-guitar duel between Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and New York jazz shredder Denny Dias.” RD While most of the album’s “songs are subtly textured” AM this one and Show Biz Kids, with its “strutting cynicism,” TB “sound like they were written for the stage.” AM “The loud guitars and pronounced backbeat of” AM those two songs and “My Old School camouflage” AM the album’s jazz leanings. The latter is a “straight ahead rock number about collegiate misdeeds, barbed with guitar hooks from…Baxter” RD along with the Stax saxophone and stuttering guitar battle in the middle.” TB “The hard bop tribute Your Gold Teeth reveal Becker and Fagen’s jazz roots.” AM The song “employs Dias again but in more tangential style – telling the story of a jaded female grifter who lives off her looks and cunning, the song is like an Elmore Leonard novel in miniature. The verse is given glacial cool by Victor Feldman’s vibes and the edgy electric piano of Fagen, while the solo section visits strange psychotropic regions.” RD The album also features “Razor Boy, with its murmuring marimbas,” AM “the country-flavored Pearl of the Quarter and the ominous, skittering King of the World.” AM |
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First posted 4/3/2008; last updated 8/23/2026. |
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