Rush
Putting the "Er..." into "Power Trio"
Sometimes Canada seems less a nation and more a litmus test for residents of the United States. Granted, it's a litmus test that occupies the majority of a continent, but we all know that size matters not, right? For bloody-minded xenophobes, Canada is an easy target of derision and mockery when they're in the mood to be indiscriminately hateful. Most people, though, simply see Canada for what it is (a lot like the United States, but colder, less homicidal and more French) and never really think much about it. But even the staunchest Canada-phile sometimes finds himself saying, "Canada... didn't they give us *shudder* Rush?"
Not that Rush is a particularly bad band. But moreso than most prog rock groups, Rush has earned itself a reputation much larger than its actual fanbase. And that reputation, for various reasons, is largely negative. They're one of those random bands that people love to hate, a group whose mere name stimulates an involuntary, Tourettes-like reaction from most people, even if they have no actual clue who or what Rush really is.
And at a glance, it's easy to understand where this antipathy comes from. Rush is a very idiosyncratic band with a very distinct sound and vibe and creed - a sound, vibe and creed few on earth would be able to adopt for themselves without dying of embarrassment. In short, they're a bunch of nerds - the lead singer/bassist (Geddy Lee) is the very definition of pencil-necked geek, a skinny, big-schnozzed 45-year-old who never outgrew his teenage gawkiness and whose singing voice hovers between "whine" and "screech." The guitarist (Alex Lifeson) is a chubby mop-top who for much of his career habitually wore a suit and dress shirt during concerts, no matter how miserably hot the venue. And the drummer (Neil Peart) embodies the very worst sort of prog rock excess - a self-styled virtuoso who apparently has a contractual clause allowing him to show off his flashy pyrotechnics for as long as he darned well pleases in every concert. In fact, Peart is quite possibly the single most ostentatious progger around (or at least gives Robert Fripp a run for his money). No doubt he's a swell guy who sends thank-you notes for every Christmas gift he receives and is kind to puppies, children and out-of-work glam rockers, but musically speaking he's overbearing to the point of irritation. Between his agonizingly showy drum performances and the pseudo-intellectual son-of-Ayn-Rand lyrics he pens as the band's sole lyricist, 80% of Rush's social unacceptability can be traced back to him (the remainder being the result of Lee's stage persona as a beaky banshee. Oh, and the group's strange predilection for album covers featuring naked men).
It's sort of hard to make a complete article of a band like this. They formed in the early '70s as a trio consisting of Lee, Lifeson and drummer John Rutsey. After a single album, Rutsey was ditched and replaced with Peart. And that's how it's been for nearly 30 years. The band has consistently produced a new album every few years and a live album every four studio albums. Aside from a creative hiatus from 1997-2001 as Peart dealt with personal crises (the death of his daughter - not cancer, despite rumors to that effect which have inexplicably persisted for more than ten years) and Lifeson and Lee worked on solo albums, the band has been a rock-solid unit for three decades. In interviews they're good-natured; on stage they're affable; they get along well with one another; and they all seem to have healthy personal lives. No temper tantrums, abuse of audients or vicious backbiting in the media here. They just keep making their little albums and acting like a bunch of dorks onstage. And no matter how much most Canadians would like for them to just go away so the nation doesn't have to claim Rush as its longest-lasting rock band, such a breakup doesn't appear to be forthcoming.
Prog bands have a tendency to dissolve or otherwise self-destruct after about ten years. This usually takes one of three forms: breaking up, embarrassing self-cannibalization / blatant selling-out or else a steady trickle of solid but irrelevant music. That sound-barrier-like milestone in a band's lifespan is a seemingly irrevocable fact of reality; Rush's music gradually became more and more pre-programmed and dull as the '80s progressed (ironic considering that a few years before they had lamented "computerized clinics for superior cynics who dance to a synthetic band"). But there often comes a second wind of sorts where a band refocuses and comes into its own once more; Yes had their 90125 (and more recently, The Ladder), Marillion had Brave and King Crimson just reinvents itself once every few years to take no chances. And Rush is no different - their latest release, Vapor Trails, came out of nowhere to cheerfully announce that hello, yes, they're all still alive, and they somehow picked up the ability to do something other than the Same Old Thing along the way. There's always a chance the band could keep trudging along for another 15 or 20 years and slip back into unintentional self-parody mode; for the time being, however, they're actually vital and interesting and I find myself feeling kindly disposed to them. Besides, making fun of Canadians is so very tired and unamusing.
Rush 1974
For people accustomed to Rush's more famous material, this album always comes as something of a shock - performed by a stripped-down three-piece with no keyboards or fancy effects (and lacking the flashy drum pyrotechnics and ponderous lyrics of Neil Peart), Rush is basically Led Zepplin Lite. For all that, it's still a solid album with a pleasant simplicity lacking in the band's later music, and far more sonic variety than the sort of homogenous sound they settled into later. You have to wonder what genius decided that an aspiring metal band should feature their logo in bright pink on the cover of their first album, though.
Neil Peart Bonus: Neil Peart does not appear on this album, which is something of a bonus in and of itself.
Fly By Night 1975
This album kicks off with far more energy and control than did Rush, which would seem to bode well for the future of the band. Ah, if only. While Fly by Night definitely features some quality tunes, there's much less musical cohesion on display than in the group's first outing. The band members try to decide if they want to be Led Zepplin Lite or King Crimson Lite, and end up being an ugly fusion that's rather less than the sum of its parts.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Rivendell," the single most haunting and mournful song ever created by the band, was given lyrics about the freaking Lord of the Rings. Good call, smart guy. Way to permanently brand your band as trio of hopeless dorks. And "Anthem" loudly proclaims new lyricist Neil Peart as a loyal drone of the Ayn Rand School of Philisophically-Rationalized Solipsism, a fact which will taint the band's songs for the next three decades.
Caress of Steel 1975
It's sort of a wonder that the band made it past this album. Me, I'd probably have given up after creating something as aimless and dull as Caress of Steel; aside from the brilliant "Bastille Day," this disc is a total mess by a band still struggling for a musical identity. There's a lot less Led Zepplin here, but an overwhelming amount of proggish noodling of the worst kind. Think "the horrible improv bits of King Crimson's 'Moonchild' stetched across an entire album side" and you've pretty much got it pegged. Recommended for completists (or others with a profound sense of masochism).
Neil Peart Bonus: The hilariously frivolous "I Think I'm Going Bald" gives Geddy Lee license to emit the most soul-wrenching scream ever set to music.
2112 1976
In a move clearly cribbed from Emerson Lake and Palmer (like many of the band's early chops, in fact), Rush decided to cement their place in the annals of embarrassingly overblown prog rock excess with a multi-part theme-based epic song about a doomed hero trapped in a dystopian future. Unlike ELP's "Karn Evil 9," however, "2112" wasn't the beginning of the end for Rush. While certainly painful to listen to half a century later with its aimless meandering and over-the-top musical narrative, the album has its moments; "2112 Overture" in particular is still a great piece of power pop. Plus its lyrics simply ooze with maudlin self-indulgence as a very literal guitar hero strugges to overcome self-pity, isolation and societal repression... which guarantees that "2112" will forever be an anthem dear to the hearts of angsty teens that, like, no one understands, man. Like ELP's "Tarkus," side two is a collection of vapid singles with no relationship to the lengthy prog workout which fills the A-side. Although the wink-wink smirk-smirk celebration which comprises drug abuse paean "A Passage to Bangkok" certainly offers a pretty good hint at why the band thought some of the twiddly filler parts of "2112" were a good idea.
Neil Peart Bonus: The lyrics to "2112" basically scream "I was written to appeal to 15-year-olds who think they're smarter and more sensitive than the rest of the world and like to feel sorry for themselves about it." I think someone had a tough adolescence.
All the World's a Stage 1976
The songs which seemed sort of lifeless and tepid on the previous four albums come to life in what is definitely Rush's best live album. First, they hadn't reduced their concerts to rote reproductions of their studio material at this point in their careers and actually played. And secondly, "Closer to the Heart" is nowhere to be seen! Easily worth the cost of admission for that reason alone. As a sexy bonus, ATWAS contains the best version of 2112 ever committed to CD - long enough to cover the good bits, but abridged to leave out the boring parts.
Neil Peart Bonus: Peart's drumming on tracks from the first album isn't really all that much better than John Rutsey's.
Farewell to Kings 1977
After several years of aimlessly casting about for an identity, Rush finally come into a sort of musical maturity here and create their first truly worthwhile album since their eponymous debut. Not that it lacks its awkward moments ("Cygnus X-1" would be twice as interesting if it were half as long), but tunes like the 12-minute Geddy Lee showcase "Xanadu" make Farewell to Kings a worthwhile purchase. This despite the fact that boring, overplayed fan-favorite "Closer to the Heart" makes its debut here.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Cygnus X-1," a lengthy tale of an astronaut's journey into the heart of a black hole, comes off well enough except for the cringingly bad spoken-word introduction that tries to explain the concept of black holes, poetically.
Hemispheres 1978 - Recommended Pick
The A-side-dominating epic returns, but this time with a difference: unlike "2112,", "Hemispheres" is actually quite interesting and provides a continuation of the story of Cygnus X-1, answering the question of what happens when you cross the event horizon of a Black Hole. Apparently you're whisked away to a mythological allegory, which is precisely what happened a year later in Disney's "The Black Hole." Maybe they're onto something. What really makes this album notable is that unlike most records with only a single song on the first side, the second side isn't merely throwaway fluff. Two notable classics reside on Side-B, in fact: the maples-vs-oaks war of "The Trees," and the beautifully-subtitled 9-part instrumental "La Villa Strangiato: An Exercise in Self-Indulgence." Not only is this the band's first record in which every song stands up on its own, it was also a vindictive thumbing of the nose at the way the rest of the prog rock universe was crashing around their ears at the time. Recommended despite the naked man on the cover.
Neil Peart Bonus: The band swears on their pancakes that Neil wasn't making a heavy-handed statement about US-Canada relations with "The Trees," but we all know they're lying.
Permanent Waves 1979 - Recommended Pick
While the rest of the prog rock universe was creating unilaterally atrocious bilge in the dark years between the mid-70s rise of punk and the early-80s prog revival by bands like Marillion, Rush was actually in peak form. Must be something in the water up north. While most people consider the radio-friendly Moving Pictures to be Rush's definitive statement, Permanent Waves actually encompasses the band's full oeuvre more effectively than any other album. Displaying cynical pop pieces like "The Spirit of Radio" and "Freewill" alongside extended, inventive compositions like "Natural Science" and the forgotten but lovely "Jacob's Ladder," this album is quite simply the best marriage of early-career excess and latter-day minimalistic precision the band ever produced.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Freewill" actually manages to bring the lyricist's awful Ayn Rand fixation into play without being obnoxious about it.
Moving Pictures 1981
Without a doubt Rush's most popular album. While not exactly the divinely-inspired masterpiece that some of the more frightening Rush obsessives would have you believe, it's easy to understand why this is such a well-liked album. It's definitely the first truly accessible pop production by the band, eschewing long-format compositions in favor of three-to-six minute pieces with lots of the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus structures that the AOR stations so adore. And there's even a wee touch of musical adventurism here (the spacey, reggae-inspired "Vital Signs" hints at what the band would have been like if they had tried to go toe-to-toe with The Police) as well as traces of the band's pompous, sci-fi-nerd past (particularly evident in six-minute mini-epic "Red Barchetta"). Sadly, half the tracks on this album have been beaten into an uninteresting mass thanks to twenty years of radio overplay, but if you can free your mind of the bad habits of unhygenic pothead DJs, there's still a glimmer of life in Moving Pictures.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Red Barchetta" isn't just a car-fetishist song, it's a futuristic car-fetishist song about a dystopian world where driving cars is illegal. Nice to see such vital, hard-hitting topics being addressed by our leading speculative intellectuals!
Exit Stage... Left 1981
It's Rush. Live. The band's sound seems a lot more tame than in their first live set, but that could be attributed in part to the fact that the recording quality is vastly improved over that release. The highlight of the disc is a quiet acoustic guitar piece called "Broon's Bane," reportedly named in honor of the fact that it drove the recording engineer into fits of screaming insanity.
Neil Peart Bonus: A beautiful rendition of YYZ is brought crashing to a dead halt when Neil decides to show off his drum pyrotechnics. Jerk. Alex and Geddy have the courtesy not to interrupt brilliant instrumentals for vainglorious wankery. What's your problem?
Signals 1982
Every prog band seems to have one of these albums in their repetoire - an album where a decent collection of songs is drained of life by misapplied technology. In this case the technology was digital recording; Signals was one of the first albums ever recorded DDD, and was therefore one of the first albums ever to suffer from the flat, brittle quality digital sounds inflicts on music (good luck finding an album that doesn't suffer that problem these days). To compound the problem, the band shed the last of its progressive rock roots during the recording of Moving Pictures, making Signals little more than a fairly rockin' pop album. At the time it was considered heavy metal since it wasn't performed completely on synthesizers, but in retrospect it's only slightly more dynamic than the rest of what the music world was producing during the early '80s. A sympathetic purple heart award goes to "The Analog Kid," an excellent song that the band didn't begin treating as such until fifteen years after it was recorded.
Neil Peart Bonus: "The Body Electric" is a shameless attempt to nick "Mr. Roboto" from Styx. Early '80s post-prog rock had enough crises to overcome even without the survivors from the '70s plundering one another's material.
Grace Under Pressure 1984
By the mid-'80s Reagan had made such an awkward mess of US-Soviet relations that even the nation's northern neighbors were starting to get a little fidgety. Add to the mix the growing role of invasive computer technology that was starting to seem a little Orwellian in nature, and it's easy to understand why so much media from 1984 was so jittery and grim. Between the internment camp nihilism of "Red Sector A," media paranoia of "Red Lenses" and environmental doldrums of "Distant Early Warning" (not to mention a song cheerfully called "Beneath the Wheels"), this is definitely Rush's most downbeart album. The oppressively impersonal synthesizer sound doesn't precisely help matters either. Grace Under Pressure is a good selection for anyone who feels like wallowing in a little existential despair.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Red Sector A" falls within the same post-apocalyptic world o' horror vein as ELP's "Karn Evil 9" and Mike+The Mechanics' "Silent Running," except that it's better than either. Credit where it's due; Neil gets a cookie for that one.
Power Windows 1985
After two albums, the band had managed to master the nuances of digital recording a little too well; Power Windows marks the beginning of Rush's infamous decade of brittle sterility. The presence of a live orchestra in the song "Marathon" doesn't add any actual warmth to the music, which sounds as mechanized and automatic as the album's namesake. A few songs manage to stand out as memorable, particularly "The Big Money," but as with so many albums to come Power Windows is essentially a wall of monotonous sound punctuated by a very few punchy stand-outs.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Territories" deserves a mention for its deep, insightful philisophy regarding the true roots of nationalism ("Better people, better food, and better beer!").
Hold Your Fire 1987
Hold Your Fire marks the pinnacle (or rather, nadir) of the band's mid-'80s fascination with sucking the life from their music with keyboards and over-production. Though the album features one of the most interesting compositions in the band's history ("Force Ten"), the mind-boggling sterility of the music on display makes the album a hard listen. Not even the winsome Aimee Mann can impart heart or soul to the nostalgic musings of "Time Stand Still."
Neil Peart Bonus: "Tai Shan" earns Peart a tummy punch for being a cringingly stereotypical example of a gape-jawed Westerner buying gullibly into Chinese mysticism. "If you raise your hands to heaven, you will live a hundred years." Good thing there, Neil, 'cause that's the only thing preventing me from dropping dead of embarrassment when I read these lyrics.
A Show of Hands 1989
It's a shame the band sticks steadfastly to its release schedule (a live album after every four studio works), because that forced A Show of Hands to come at the worst possible time: in the wake of the band's most brittle, lifeless work. Not surprisingly, the live performances here are equally flat, so weighted with programmed synthesizers and pretaped music that the only real difference between this and a studio album is the audience noise. And even that's horridly generic, with no distinct voices to lend the noise some personality. The only real saving grace is that the 70-minute time cap on CDs in the late '80s meant that the band didn't have time to include the most off-key rendition of "2112" ever recorded, which appeared on the "Show of Hands" video. When the kindest thing you can say about an album is how it could have been worse, it's a good time to skip out.
Neil Peart Bonus: The obligatory 5-minute drum solo is distilled into its own track for easy skippage. A little too late for poor "YYZ," but at least this proves they can be taught.
Presto 1989
On its own, Presto isn't much to listen to, and not even the fleet of adorable bunnies on the cover can increase its appeal to the casual listener. However, in the context of the band's catalog, it's a transitional piece - a first step from the monotonous agony of the previous few albums and toward something resembling enjoyable music. This album has no real standouts and quite a few duds ("Hand Over Fist" and "Anagram (For Mongo)" in particular), but at least there's a hint that actual human beings created this music - which is more than can be said about Hold Your Fire.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Anagram," a pointless exercise in creating questionable... anagrams. It stands toe-to-toe with Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" for sheer vapid meaninglessness and goes down swinging!
Roll the Bones 1991
It's hard for me to say if I like this album because of its actual merits (unlikely) or because it was released in those delicate years in which I was in high school and anything I listened to excessively at the time will forever be enveloped in a pink cloud of nostalgic unreality... a cloud made all the more cloying by my having seen them live during this tour. But in the context of the Rush discography, it's still the best thing to happen in nearly a decade; after the dreary Hold Your Fire and the even drearier Presto, the upbeat and even vaguely amusing music here - particularly in the title track and the instrumental "Where's My Thing?" - was a welcome change of pace. There's still a lot of empty synth-heavy junk to wade through, but songs like the unusually subtle "Dreamline" make it vaguely worth the effort.
Neil Peart Bonus: The "Roll the Bones" rap is so cheesy and awful that it actually works. "The night has a thousand saxophones, so get out there and rock! And roll the bones." You know it, baby!
Counterparts 1993
This album hit like a ton of bricks upon its initial release - after ten years of steadily-waning relevance and increasingly out-of-touch synth rock noodling, Rush ditched most of the keyboards and the prim sound processing and actually kicked out the jams for a few tracks. While the music is still obviously Rush (with all that entails... most gratingly, the maudlin self-important weepiness of "Nobody's Hero"), it was heartening to see that the band still remembered that an important part of being a rock band is to rock from time to time. Counterparts was an exceptionally redeeming album for everyone except people who hate the band no matter what. In which case, why are you reading this, you twit?
Neil Peart Bonus: The almost-cleverly named "Animate" (it's about the feminine spirit inside men, aka anima - geddit?) reads like the script of a conceited guy in a black turtleneck trying to score chicks by regaling everyone with his "deep" thoughts on feminism. You know the kind. By law, there's one at every party where classical music is played.
Test for Echo 1996
If Counterparts was Rush's Going for the One - an unexpectedly excellent creation by a band long ago written off as defunct - Test for Echo was its disappointing Tormato-like follow-up. The hard, cutting edge brandished just a few years prior appears here, but it's blunted and weak, dulled by tepid songwriting and the return of too many bland synthesizers. The title track and "Driven" keep this from being a total wash, but after seeing such promising signs of life with Counterparts, Test for Echo reads like an EEG on its way to flatline.
Neil Peart Bonus: "Net Boy." What is it with prog bands and their pathetically outdated technological references? While not as shameful as J-Tull.com, "Net Boy" still manages to induce painful shudders in its target audience (i.e., nerds) by playing like some sort of "Analog Kid" for the early 1990s... released in the late 1990s. "Microserfs" this ain't.
Different Stages 1998 - Recommended Pick
Clearly intended as a comprehensive live retrospective for the band's career, Different Stages performs its job admirably with three huge discs of music spanning the band's entire career. Little material from the mid-to-late '80s is included; this is not a bad thing. Welcome additions include forgotten greats like "The Analog Kid" and "Natural Science." Such songs help compensate for the overly-indulgent complete (and off-key) rendition of "2112" and another stupid drum solo, this time lasting eight interminable minutes. The third disc contains the entirety of a concert from the Farewell to Kings tour and includes every song from that album (except, happily, the overplayed "Closer to the Heart"), as well as the most powerful performances by the band ever committed to record. The energy of the 1978 material does sort of throw the more tame and by-the-numbers material on discs one and two into sharp relief, but the 1998 recordings are still far more visceral than "A Show of Hands" and "All the World's A Stage," so it's definitely worth a go.
Neil Peart Bonus: I'm not sure whose terrible idea it was to include a complete (and poor) 1998 performance of "2112" in its entirety on this album, but I'm betting it's Neil's.
Vapor Trails 2002
What a difference half a decade makes. Usually when bands disappear for long periods of time and suddenly return, their fans can't help but wish they hadn't bothered. But our heroes spent their time wisely, reminding themselves that they matter. The result is that Alex and Geddy came back and said, "Hey, Neil, why should you be the only one who shows off? We wanna rock out too." So they did.
Neil Peart Bonus: The Fear Triology returns for Part Four, "Freeze." As with so many other triologies which suddenly have an extra chapter grafted on (see also: Star Wars, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Xanth), this serves less to advance the integrity of the original concept and mostly to look like a desperate gimmick. Plus, Peart's portrait in the CD booklet makes him look nearly as dessicated and evil as Montgomery Burns.