A stylistic regrouping after the mad sprawl of Countdown To Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic boasts the paradox of having more songs (eleven) and a shorter runtime (33 minutes and change) than any other Steely Dan record while still being one of their deepest, most immersive listens. Give credit to the second-best starting three of their whole catalog: the Horace Silver-interpolating harmonic lushness of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” the shifty, itchy clavinet-hiccup desperado funk of “Night By Night,” and the electric piano glow of Laurel Canyon comedown “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” (the best song Joni Mitchell never wrote) are the three songs that, in album-opening sequence, are accessible and sincere enough to win over most skeptics.

Those tracks provide momentum enough to carry the record through the remainder of what’s still a pretty brisk Side A: “Barrytown” is a major standard in a better version of 1974, and their burbling upending of Bubber Miley and Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” adds of-its-era wah-wah but doesn’t subtract too much. Flip it over, and the situation gets frantic, short-yet-lively opuses in miniature that rattle through manic Bird homages (“Parker’s Band”) and string-coated ELO-isms (“Through With Buzz”) and a gonzo diversion into outlaw country (“With A Gun”). But it doesn’t scatter itself too far afield, and this is the record where their eclecticism starts to feel like the work of a discrete unit instead of a collection of parts.

It’s also the record where they finally become both truly entrenched in the L.A. scene and uniquely at odds with it — the album cover is black-and-white NYC in winter, about as far away as you can get from Santa Monica and still have a connection to the American music-biz machine. And as a striking side effect, Pretzel Logic feels like their most wistful, isolated record — everyone’s lonely here, even Napoleon. When the humid blues of the title track keeps culminating in the realization that nostalgic wishful thinking for a time and place to fit in is asking for the impossible — “those days are gone forever/over a long time ago” — it stings hard, just like the pleas for Rikki’s change of heart or the rejection of that schlemiel from Barrytown. Even “Any Major Dude,” the Dan’s finest moment of outreach and empathy for one of the countless woeful souls that populate their songs, has a bridge that hinges on stark reality worthy of Teddy Pendergrass three years on: “you can try to run but you can’t hide from what’s inside of you.” That Becker and Fagen were starting to bring in the best session players they could find to help them realize the full sonic potential of this loneliness is an irony that’s not only not lost, but is more or less integral to the whole crazy enterprise.