CAN'T BUY A THRILL

Can't Buy a Thril, Steely Dan's first album, was released in 1972. The album is an interesting blend of jazz influence (especially on piano, sometimes even on drums), pop singing (the vocals being clean, melodic and really charming, nicely fitting the whole thing) and probably rock influenced guitar!

The songs are short, not very progressive, yet not builded in a typical type of rock or pop songwriting. The rhythm is most of the time structured around piano (jazzy approach and archetypical riffs, with nice bits of solos and excentric melodies), smooth bass and jazz-rock drums.

The intersting points about this album, and also about the band, is the rhythm constructed around the piano, with lower notes to constrast the higher notes, doing a melodic and charming oeuvre! The bass is well crafted, not passive and cheap like in typical rock bands. The drums, jazzy and rocking, are perfectly fitting this ensemble, taking the right spot on that type of music, not on the front, not on the back, right in the middle, where you woud want and expect it!

The music is catchy, well-written, unique and supported by fancy and superior lyrics most of time. This album (well, this band in fact), should have been classified in the Prog-Related subgenres, where it would have more fitted, because, yes in fact there is jazz-rock/fusion influence on this band, but it's more the song crafting and the general approach that define it's relation with prog, and for that reason I believe it should have been put on another subgenre of Prog. It would also have given the band better scores for their albums, because people seems to build their critics on the fact that this is not jazz-rock/fusion in the branch of Herbie Hancock... Who said it was?

5 stars! (A masterpiece of Prog-Related music!)

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