Steely Dan’s second album starts with a giddy flourish of pure hyper-swing mania and ends with post-apocalyptic ruin. If that sounds like a wide gamut to run, Countdown To Ecstasy sprawls all the way out; in the interim you also get woozy balladry and stage-band stomping, Cajun-adjacent twang-soul and icy samba on vibes, fusion-style complexity and deep, deep hooks. It’s a big flailing identity-scrambling polyglot, a band already hot out the gates very quickly deciding that it’s time to branch out. It would almost be some kind of bewildering disaster except for the fact that they hit nearly every single distantly spaced target dead center. Can the same band pull off both a boogie-frenzied chops-expo (“Bodhisattva”) and a weepy country love song (“Pearl Of The Quarter”)? Well, if you feel like sticking around to find out, you’ll also get the opportunity to hear “My Old School,” which is a real killer even if you don’t give a damn about old Bard College pot bust stories. (Chevy Chase played drums with ‘em back then, y’know.)

It should be noted that this is the only Steely Dan album actually composed with specific band members in mind, arrangements fine-tuned to each player’s working methods and abilities. The abilities in question are pretty much limitless, at least if “Bodhisattva” is enough to clue you in; not for nothing does that song kick off the whole deal and push forward the whole notion that these guys aren’t just a bunch of slick word-slingers. Of course, the words slung are worthy of noting — “Bodhisattva” as a tongue-in-cheek eyeroll towards Western Orientalism (dig the intentionally vague, inane conflation “The shine of your Japan/The sparkle of your China”), the money-where-your-mouth-is jousting of “Your Gold Teeth,” “King Of The World” and its lonely broadcasting into the void, and “Show Biz Kids” as a bewildered careen through the machinations of the New York-reared writers’ adopted West Coast home turf (liner annotations: “The Dan moves to L.A. and is forced to give an oral report”). This is how good they sounded when they were scattershot — enjoy it while knowing that there’s cohesion yet to come.