The Darcys: ‘AJA’ – Review

They certainly have balls these Darcy’s. Struggling with the creation of their eponymous first album they decided to change tack completely, giving themselves a break by tackling Aja by Steely Dan in its entirety. As you do.

The musical equivalent of taking a break from marathon training by climbing Everest, it shows just what a confident, talented and bloody-minded band The Darcy’s are.

“Break” over, creative batteries recharged, they went back into the studio after Aja, finished their debut, released it last year, and promptly buggered off to enjoy the fruits of their labour touring with Bombay Bicycle Club. Now to tide us over until their third studio album we get to hear how they tackled messrs Fagen and Becker, and it’s bloody good as well. Bastards.

Make no mistake, dealing with the Dans requires some major musical chops. Session musicians of the seventies knew that a gig with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (who were famously told to form their own band because the songs they wrote for other people were too complicated to perform) would be a challenging, gruelling, and possibly doomed experience. The recording session for Gaucho used 42 studio musicians, eleven engineers and took over a year, a lasting monument to the pair’s perfectionism. Aja, the album that preceded Gaucho featured the classic singles “Peg”, “Josie”, and “Deacon Blues”, and is such a masterpiece that you can even forgive it for giving a name to one of the most wretchedly inane bands ever to smugly prance around the Top Of The Pops studios.

The Darcy’s approach this rock face with no fear at all, happy to put their own interpretations on these standards and in the process creating an album that is creepy, complex, and colourful, managing to sound cutting edge and retro all at once.

“Aja” itself sounds like “Dark SIde Of The Moon” covered by Beck. ”Josie” is transformed from jaunty happy pop into an echo chamber of eerie gospel and mellow hammond boogie. “Peg” thrashes around in a wonderfully bad-tempered way with jazz/fuzz guitars lifted straight from Sondre Lerche’s own essential “Phantom Punch”. The wistful “Deacon Blues” goes completely left-field, opening like Trent Reznor’s “Social Network” soundtrack, then lurching into processed drum loops, a squall of buzzing guitars, and mournful backing vocals intoning their collective wish to “die behind the wheel”. It’s all rather marvellous really, not least because it’s free, available for download from www.thedarcys.ca, and you can order the album on 180g vinyl, surely the hallmark of a real band these days? Recommended.