Sunken Condos doesn't ease on its groove, the way the otherwise excellent Morph the Cat did. Much of that is due to a pronounced emphasis on rhythm. All this high-octane rhythm can be heard on Sunken Condos, Fagen's 2012 album and easily the liveliest solo album he's released since The Nightfly in 1982. With Walter Becker, he took several classic Steely Dan albums on tour, he became a frequent fixture at Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles, and, in 2010, he became the ringleader of the Dukes of September, a superstar blue-eyed soul revue featuring Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs. Morph the Cat wrapped up an alleged trilogy in 2006 - a trilogy that only became apparent when Donald Fagen's three solo albums were boxed in a set called The Nightfly Trilogy in 2007 - and Fagen then busied himself with live performances, something he avoided at the peak of his popularity in the '70s and '80s. However, Steely Dan completists will certainly find enough here to keep them happy. The static grooves, coupled with the long song lengths, and general lack of dynamic movement makes this record one of the least essential of Fagen's recorded output. Kamakiriad is pleasant as background music, but in the end it doesn't provide enough interesting moments to rank as a must-have. Walter Becker, who produced the record, as well as contributing bass and guitar, also co-wrote "Snowbound." Perhaps not surprisingly, it does the best job at evoking classic Steely Dan. The choruses are as catchy and cryptic as you would expect from Donald Fagen, but the verses are less than memorable.
Another shortcoming of this record is the fact that the verse melodies don't sound very developed. Although the drum tracks are not synthesized, they sure sound that way, and even the horns sound electronic at times, a far cry from the lush arrangements of Aja. There is a slightly antiseptic feeling to Kamakiriad. The songs on Kamakiriad are mainly static one-chord vamps, with little of the interesting off-beat hits or chord changes that characterized most of Steely Dan's corpus (although, it must be said, Two Against Nature isn't too far conceptually from what Fagen is doing here). Evocative or not, this is not Fagen's best effort. It is an odd concept, and one that is not obvious to the listener, but reflection upon Fagen's liner notes while listening to the album does tend to evoke a vision of a non-apocalyptic near future, where swingers sip cocktails and fresh vegetable juices as they groove to synthesized jazz-rock. Donald Fagen's second solo album is a song cycle of sorts, following the adventures of an imaginary protagonist as he travels the world in his car, a brand-new Kamakiri.
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