The comeback that sprung from Two Against Nature seems like a blip on the radar compared to the critical reevaluation and generational carryover that the first wave of Steely Dan’s records received in its wake. And maybe you could chalk that up to said comeback resulting in all of two studio albums, the most recent one nearly a dozen years old; there are two pretty good Donald Fagen solo records in far more recent memory. As a side effect, Everything Must Go feels like an official final statement, cutting off the notion of Steely Dan as a continuing enterprise and cementing them as something more of a legacy act, a name for Becker and Fagen to operate under in the past tense while they do their own things with separate autonomy. It doesn’t hurt the case that the title cut’s the closing track, and bears all the signs of a metaphor for the end of a once-successful enterprise liquidating its assets.

It’s an obvious, to-the-point analogy — and that’s part of the problem. Allusions that made personal specificity out of familiar themes always stood as one of the best strengths of Steely Dan’s songwriting, and Everything Must Go makes the themes far more obvious than they had been at any point in the band’s discography. Where it took a few listens to a song like Countdown To Ecstasy’s “King Of The World” for the postapocalyptic nuances to really soak in, there’s just one big gag at the center of the similarly end-times-minded “The Last Mall” — how and why people might go shopping for things that a total Armageddon would render irrelevant — and it’s the difference between a song that works its way into your subconscious and a song that makes you say “I get it.”

A couple concepts sound cleverly modernized enough — the team of deity-targeting assassins in the pulpy “Godwhacker” would make for a hell of a Vertigo comics series, and “Pixeleen” is a sly riff on post-cyberpunk blockbuster video game/film objectification. But casting a jaundiced eye towards the contemporary world’s stumbles towards increasingly ludicrous forms of masculine cool is the kind of gig that requires a faster turnaround time than your average perfectionist can afford these days. But most of the record is filled with half-formed observations and obvious jabs that are nudge-your-ribs ironic — check how blatantly post-split-up lament “Things I Miss the Most” veers towards the surrender of luxury goods (“The Audi TT/The house on the Vineyard”) as a loss on par with companionship, or how “Slang Of Ages” hammers in how pathetic some poorly juxtaposed, once-cool dialect sounds in the wrong (aging) hands.

But it’s the arrangement that really lets the vibe down. It’s easily the least-catchy Steely Dan album ever recorded — never forget that back in the ’70s there were always deathless hooks and striking melodies there to justify all that highly touted musicianship, where here there’s nothing but ambience. And it’s a sanitized, antiseptic ambience, too. The sleekness sounds Teflon-slick, the moments meant to be calmly louche feel totally spent, and their once agile sense of creating a fluid sense of rhythm, whether mellow or ramped-up, somehow winds up sounding too stiff to swing. Which is a shame, since Becker and Fagen contributed more to the actual instrumental recordings than at any point since their early days — Becker even contributes his first-ever lead vocal on “Slang Of Ages” (and sounds jarringly out of place). Everything just went.