Everything Must Go

With their inverted jaw lines and weakness for male pattern baldness, Howard Becker and Walter Fagen may not automatically set you off reminiscing about 1980’s Uzi and Chinos-fest Miami Vice. But consider how Michael Mann originally conceived of the show as an Armani-clad wooden horse, carrying the detritus of Reaganomics into the front rooms of the A-Team generation. Substitute saxophone solos for Don Johnson and you have an approach there to low-level subversion of which Steely Dan would heartily approve – poisonous comment cloaked in blankly immaculate embellishments.

Everything Must Go, the follow-up to 2000’s Two Against Nature, contains all the elements the duo have long been lauded for – smart-arse lyrics dealing with sleaze-bag loners, sceptic relationships, and corrosive social practices, and jazzy, white soul backings full of scientifically plotted solos and arrangements. Lift music written by William Burroughs, is how their cheerleaders will try to sell it. But anyone unconvinced by Becker and Fagen’s seditious intent may well find the atmosphere anodyne, airless and cloying.

In a world where Tony Soprano strikes more resonant chords than Crockett and Tubbs, this record sounds scarily unessential.