Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy (UHQR All-Analog 200g Clarity Vinyl) (1973/2022) [24bit/96kHz]

Steely Dan were finally hitting their stride with July 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy. After setting the SD sonic template with November 1972’s debut LP on ABC Records, Can’t Buy Thrill, they reshuffled some personnel — for one thing, original co-lead vocalist David Palmer departed (albeit providing some backing vocals here and there), while keyboard whiz kid Donald Fagen took over essentially all the lead vocals fulltime, from this point forward — and the five-piece collective worked out much of their sophomore album’s core material live onstage during 1973’s hectic tour schedule, all of which added to Countdown’s inherent interactive grit.

The next treatise in the mighty Dan’s West Coast decay-and-decadence diary, Countdown to Ecstasy is the blueprint for how the band’s conjoined pair of masterminds, the aforementioned Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, would come to both chronicle and embody the excesses of the ’70s — sometimes in firsthand documentarian fashion and other times via more ironically detached narratives, more than occasionally resulting in soaring over the heads of numerous listeners who never quite got the sardonicism therein.

The version of Countdown we have here before us today is also the second entry in Analogue Productions' comprehensive Steely Dan UHQR series, which began in earnest with quite the bang last fall with Can’t Buy a Thrill. (You can read my own News report about the entire Steely Dan UHQR series to come here, and then you can read my esteemed colleague Mark Smotroff’s review of the UHQR Thrill here.)

The basic series stats are these. The 45rpm 2LP UHQR version of Countdown has been pressed at Analogue Productions’ Quality Record Pressings on 200g Clarity Vinyl, packaged in a deluxe box. Each UHQR is pressed using hand-selected vinyl. The Countdown box set, as do the other entries in this series, has an SRP of $150.

Tracklist:
01. Bodhisattva
02. Razor Boy
03. The Boston Rag
04. Your Gold Teeth
05. Show Biz Kids
06. My Old School
07. Pearl Of The Quarter
08. King Of The World



Thanks to the Original customer!