10 Rock Band Reunions That REALLY Didn't Work
9. Everything Must Go - Steely Dan
No one is ever going to call Steely Dan the edgiest band in the world or anything. Despite their love and boost from people like John Mulaney, this is about as middle-aged sounding as rock and roll can get, with songs that feel like they're meant to be listened to on a yacht in the Virgin Islands with a drink in your hand. You can't knock them for musicianship though...but you can knock them for their songcrafting.
After spending nearly a decade away from each other, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker never were able to put the pieces back together for the classic Steely Dan sound, with their newer efforts sounding like the more stale type of yacht rock and just feels tired after a while. As much as their material may have been laid back back in the day, they did at least change it up by having some killer guitar solos or telling seedy stories about drug dealers. You aren't going to find too much of that on their farewell record Everything Must Go, but that's just scratching the surface of what's wrong here.
Since the album before Two Against Nature already sounded bloated and somehow took a Grammy away from Kid A by Radiohead, this is even slower than that, sounding like a band desperately trying to push themselves and always coming up short. Steely Dan are definitely worthy of a Grammy nod, but this album just sounds too tired to care anymore.