Believe it or not, Steely Dan still makes good music—but you have to be willing to put in the hours. Spend enough time in their increasingly narrowed jazz-pop cul de sac, and the sharp ironies and wry fatalism can emerge as starkly as ever. Other times, the lite-funk just isn't worth wading through. Keyboardist and vocalist Donald Fagen's new solo album Morph the Cat (Reprise) contains but a small handful of those worthwhile numbers. One of them, "Brite Nitegown," begins by daring to sound a little like something other than Steely Dan. The skittering beat and falsetto vocals wouldn't sound out of place coming from Prince or even Pharrell Williams. Granted, it's hard to imagine either of those guys—even at their most eccentric—titling a song after W.C. Fields' pet name for the Grim Reaper. The track really takes off, however, in its extended closing vamp, as Fagen warns over and over again, "You can't fight with the fella in the brite nitegown," with a bassline that creepily follows his every step. As the horn section and wah-wah guitar proceed into an intense funeral march, you realize that Fagen has actually inserted something like frenzy or even chaos into his finicky, perfectionist modus operandi.