Donald Fagen, the singing half of Steely Dan, makes an oddly over-qualified species of pop. His strained, nasal vocals have the cynical detachment of Dylan; his warm chord sequences owe more to Broadway and the Brill Building.

Nevertheless, his third solo album is as relevant as a Bill Murray movie or a Chris Ware comic book - bittersweet and immaculately finished. Each song depicts a vivid scenario: the anti-Republican sci-fi of Mary Shut the Garden Door; the airport of Security Joan (Fagen's Lovely Rita). The Night Belongs to Mona could be a sequence from Scorsese's After Hours, but the album is imbued with a post-9/11 dread, which deters Fagen from recycling the nostalgia and Lynchian fantasy of his previous albums.

Mortality is another theme, so it's blackly appropriate that the funky Brite Nitegown lists three encounters with death: a verse each for sickness, murder and drugs. With razor-sharp horns and Prince-like vocals, it's a killer.