Like Donald Fagen's more overtly conceptualised Morph the Cat, Walter Becker's Circus Money is a record that blooms with more freshness, passion, and conviction than Don and Walt's two most recent outings as Steely Dan.From its sixth song, the title track, Circus Money is a reggaed-up, soul-fry (as the soul fries) spree. It is boozy, salacious, undignified, a million laughs, bitter, pitiless, and doomed.
Yet just as compelling as this carnal carnival, with its fangs and its smarts and its flying fur, are the five dysphoric songs which constitute almost the full first half of the album like a bust before a boom. Sonically fine-spun, they are nonetheless thick with the damp and desperation of persistent dreams and regrets.
'Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore' is the most chill-giving of the bunch. Becker, reaching new and surprising heights of vocal expressiveness for a man not well used to the role, sings of a homecoming in which 'home' is a desolate, haunted space. If that 'dopey Irish Setter dog, Regan' is a sly allusion to Lear, then we should probably be thinking of the King in humbled and hopeless mode on the heath. And 'Bob,' you sense, is a codeword for nothing less than emotion, focus, and meaning. The player, played-out and alone with his ghosts, laments their loss while still not certain that he would ultimately have been better off as Ethical Man.
Becker's band, meanwhile, grooves rockstead-easy in a deep freeze, the track as fascinatingly glacial and necrotic as one of Gaucho's De Palma-like crawls of pleasure over sun-glossed L.A. surfaces, albeit of a gloomier and more ominous cast than they. Rhythm guitar blinks like pale sunlight glimpsed through pines. We get keyboard textures like murky pools and sweet, smoky effluvia, the cold comfort curling around our downbeat hero who is still slightly breathless from the blows he has taken and dazed by the scale of his defeat. A cool sliver of the voice of Carolyn Leonhart-Escoffery, Walterlette supreme, drops dub-wise on the beat as branches tap against the window and the tap drip drip drip drip drip drip drips ... then sudden piano disintegrates dreamily like light as unconsciousness lets its curtain fall.
'There's an ocean full of midnight running right up to the door.'
Heavy bass for heavy times.
Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore, a cruel joke - I see it as quite a bit darker than you, in my vision the protagonist is a child. Where I come from in the past when a single mother had a boyfriend she would often tell the kids he's their uncle. This kid came home and the dog still loves him but the doors are locked because Bob is not his 'uncle' anymore. They're kicked out, that's what this big wide world is good for: hard luck. Similar to Richard Thompson's End Of The Rainbow it's a look at life's cruelties that's made more jarring because it's to a kid. It's like a sick sad joke song.
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