Side one, and the cereal has to settle before anything can be judged. (That’s my word for crackle-and-pops now — get it?) Once it does, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” comes up sounding good. It has never been my favorite Steely Dan song, but it’s a good opener and it does the job.
By the start of “Night by Night” the cereal has mostly stood down, though the occasional pop still lands. What doesn’t stand down is the engineering: muffled, like a softer image through a vintage lens. Good soundstage — wide, properly placed — but not the treble sparkle I want.
“Any Major Dude Will Tell You” [“SD” throughout the original; expanded here for the reader’s benefit —Ed.] is one of my all-time favorite SD songs, and it does sound livelier here. Still missing something up top, though. Thick, and a little smeared.
Well, that sucks. Maybe this record has just been played a lot. That’s the thing about a used pressing: you can’t tell whether you’re hearing 1974, the plant that stamped it, or forty years of somebody else’s stylus. Whatever the cause, this copy doesn’t do what Gaucho does, and that’s the same band six years on.
