A) After a selective binge, I needed exorcism.

B) Nothing else on the stove at the moment.

C) I don’t mind if it shanks my credibility with jazz-only folk, although I sympathize.

D) The glory days of long-running, artistically progressive rock groups are long over – notwithstanding a few modern exceptions – and given the sorry state of today’s popular music, why am I apologizing?

E) All of the above, plus a couple of cold ones.

I’m not the fan I used to be, but I still admire Rush in some ways. Bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer Neil Peart are clear-headed, able musicians with a work ethic beyond reproach. My problem with Rush is that they tended to adhere to the Big Rock Band Rules: Write the album, record it, learn how to play it live (!), go play it live, repeat cycle. In other words, the album becomes holy writ, recreated in performance where Mr. T-Shirt in the audience can air drum everything that happens on stage. As someone who gravitated toward jazz, King Crimson’s improvisations, etc., I came to assume that musicians with Rush’s ability ought to take chances when they perform, but they play it safe. (I don’t count throwing a drumstick in the air as being dangerous.) But I’m being unfair. Rush isn’t a jam band, and one could argue the opposite: if you spend time creating good parts and arrangements for songs, why change them on a whim live?

Individually, Rush set standards. Apart from a couple of obvious influences, Alex Lifeson devised an original mix of hefty yet ambiguous chords and melodic solos. Geddy Lee’s hyperactive bass style makes him the Jaco of post-progressive, while his vocals took a while to descend from their initial wailings. Lee also started playing keyboards, first as a side item, then as a main instrument. I’m not one of those people who regard Neil Peart as the greatest drummer in the whole wide universe, but you have to admit he’s darn creative and he likes challenging himself, safety nets notwithstanding. I don’t know of any other rock drummer who takes the craft more seriously than Neil.

Peart’s lyrics present some problems, in that their iambic stiffness and fantasy character (at least in the Tolkeinish ‘70s) don’t age well. Later lyrics ditched the fiction but retained the rigid, pseudo-poetic character. Overblown narratives like “2112” and “Hemispheres” are Spinal Tap fodder, despite having solid ideas at their core. At other times, Neil balances verbiage with flow, and clarity with poetry, and I would say that his best lyrics emerged around the time the band made its best music, in the early 1980s. The trick with music and words is finding a presentation appropriate for the content, and if the two are married, then all the better.

A lot of those who brickbat Peart’s lyrics take shots at his early Ayn Rand influence as well. Let me reiterate that Neil’s style is often clumsy and sophomoric despite its best intentions, but I don’t mind the Rand-ish thoughts in comparison to the confessional, fantastical, or hypocritical things that you might hear elsewhere. In an age of envy and relativism – and mystical fanaticism, for that matter – it can be shocking to hear someone sing about earning your way, or choosing reason and accountability. It might also be inspirational. But I won’t dwell on that here.

Anyhoo, after years of sneering at Rush on aesthetic grounds, I recently revisited a couple of their mid-period albums out of nostalgia and found more sustenance than I expected. Perhaps it was a thirst for personalized, accomplished rock in a pop culture that lionizes the vacuous and disposable. I’m only reviewing a few titles below, the ones I think make up Rush’s best string of releases, which I’ve gradually filtered back into the collection via remastered CDs. But first, the pre-history:

Rush’s eponymous debut album of 1974 presents a hard rocking Zeppelin Jr.; anything resembling artistry hasn’t entered radar range yet. Original drummer John Rutsey does a good enough job, and Alex lets loose in “Working Man”, an electrifying Big E jam. Fly By Night (1975) brings Peart aboard, who strengthens the drumming and lyrics, although the foursquare song structures and Lee’s screechy singing maintain a simple rock approach. It’s got the catchy title track and maybe a couple of other items to recommend it. Caress of Steel raises the bar, from the three-part fantasy jam “The Necromancer” (silly story, cool riffs) to the side-long suite on Side 2. Caress may not be a pleasant album to listen to, and the band still lives vicariously through certain influences, but a few original moments can be heard.

In 1976 came 2112, often stamped their first classic, but I’ve never been awed by it. The side-long title piece – concerning an individual’s attempt to bring life to a robotic collective – indicates that Rush did not have the instrumental variety or creative scope to assemble a satisfying extended work. It sounds like one big hulk of snowshoe metal with barely any key changes, let alone thematic extensions or what have you. I always got a kick out of the Grand Finale, though. The second half of 2112 features five so-so songs, of which the token “Passage to Bangkok” stands out.

That’s it for the tapes in my garage and/or my memory bank. And now to the middle sequence:

Kings marks new ambitions within the group. All three members expand the palette: Alex on a wider array of guitars, Lee with synthesizer, and Peart with colorful percussives. The music approaches the surface variety of the progressive rock Rush had claimed as influences, and it retains the muscular sound of their recent history - kind of a middle ground that might satisfy listeners of either camp.

The first half of the album is notably more advanced than previous efforts. The Coleridge fantasy “Xanadu” is their greatest accomplishment to date, an integral extended piece and not just a workshop of riffs and time changes. Not only that, they bring some atmosphere to the track’s introduction, too. “Xanadu” may be playful escapism at heart, but it nevertheless ranks as a top offering. (Did they speed up the tape slightly for this track? It’s a little off-pitch.) The title track is a somewhat lesser triumph, with layered guitars and stop-start rhythms under a Peartian lyric that re-imagines society. I bet this is the sort of thing they wanted to write back in 1975, but couldn’t.

After those two songs, the second half of the album slides downward. Well, there’s nothing really wrong with the three-chord anthem “Closer to the Heart”, except that it’s a pesky concert staple. The filler “Cinderella Man” is much ado about nothing, yet the instrumental break contains a groove jauntier than any they’d yet recorded. “Madrigal” almost lulls itself out of existence. The main misstep is the brutish riffarama “Cygnus X-1”, a sci-fi story with absolutely arbitrary chord movement (pretending to be adventurous, but Rush weren’t advanced harmonists at this stage) and awful screaming from Lee near the end. There are a few salvageable parts, but it’s still an embarrassing relic.

While uneven, this album broadens Rush’s outlook and puts them on an investigative path in “Xanadu” and “Farewell”.


Hemispheres
1978

The title piece of Hemispheres returns to the side-long epic. It has more interesting musical ideas than “2112” but suffers the same flaw of not needing to be as long as it is. The lyrics use mythological characters to contrast the left and right sides of the brain – reason and love, Apollo and Dionysius – but this conceit hardly deserves a whole story replete with a trip to Olympus. At any rate, it shows that Peart was sold on the value of reason but proposing that the emotional lobes get exercised as well, and thanks to the god of balance, you might be able to create a “perfect sphere” and be a well-rounded person. Trite, yeah, but the music is good, if repetitive.

The second half of the album starts with “Circumstances” (a hard rocker with a stirring middle break) and goes into “The Trees”, Peart’s fable about the evils of proactive egalitarianism. The instrumental section in “The Trees” showcases the band’s newfound subtlety and dynamics – in this case, warbly guitar arpeggios, a soft synth lead, and a stylish 5/4 workout. The closing instrumental “La Villa Strangiato” runs the gamut from rocking anthem to jazz runs to husky metal, all denoted with Rush’s increasing technical skills. It feels cobbled together, and in my experience it’s actually more fun to play than listen to.

Aside from a few wincing moments, namely the vocals of the title suite, Hemispheres tallies up fairly well. With shades of both past and future, it can be heard as a transitional record, plus “The Trees” and “La Villa” work fine on their own terms.


Permanent Waves
1980

Here begins what I consider Rush’s apex trilogy, where all of their creative and technical components come into alignment. Now the chops serve the material, instead of being intricate or stretched out just for the sake of it. Rush never really had the conceptual depth to fill their earlier “epics,” but they had improved at filling mid-size songs with well-arranged information, as this album’s “Spirit of Radio” and “Freewill” attest. In the former, a schizoid array of riffs, basslines, and sequenced synth approximates the variety you might hear on an open-minded radio station, while “Freewill” shows how much smarter the group had gotten with their hard-rock tendencies. The grooves and transitional lines all lead somewhere, while the lyric takes a straightforward stand for rationality. Less neo-prog and more neo-pop is “Entre Nous”, thick with guitars and topped by an analytical (and slightly awkward) love lyric. The group’s playing shines in these three tracks, but more than that, Rush attains a new level of confidence. Rather than experimenting with direction, they’ve found it.

The other three tracks leave a few minor holes. “Jacob’s Ladder” is a descendant of “Cygnus X-1” in that it attempts to depict a scene (a thunderstorm) with regimented riff-rock. While it’s certainly better than the black-hole ditty, the scattered vocal lines are a little too Playskool. “Different Strings” is probably the best of Rush’s ballads so far, arpeggiated and strummed with care, but it doesn’t resonate much – not that one would expect it to. It ends with a stinger of a Lifeson solo. The closing mini-epic “Natural Science” features several compelling components, but some of the connections are forced (hear the non-sequitur crossfade between the first two sections). I suspect the piece was assembled from a bunch of stray riffs and chord sequences, with Peart’s “grand observation” lyric intended to tie everything together. As it approaches the end, certain themes develop weight – thanks mostly to Alex’s stern chords – so I usually have a better impression of this track at its conclusion than I do in its first few minutes.

Rush neither overreach nor pander on Permanent Waves, at least not to detrimental extent. Along with that, the melodies and lyrics have become more concise and palatable than before. Perhaps some of the streamline came from absorbing pop’s “new wave” alongside a complex progressive mindset. Recording-wise, their studio meticulousness makes everything clean and visceral, if a little plumb-lined.


Moving Pictures
1981

Generally regarded as the ultimate Rush album, I can’t think of any reason to vote differently. The material is even stronger, and the musicians are each at the top of their game, particularly Alex Lifeson, whose skills are on wide display. Only overexposure might dull one’s shine for the first four songs, the very definition of a classic LP side. “Tom Sawyer”, “Red Barchetta”, the instrumental “YYZ”, and “Limelight” distill the trio’s forceful musicality into resilient radio and stage favorites. The one word you have to use when talking about Rush at their best is craft, and certainly the staying power of these songs is due to the attention to detail with which they were constructed. I’m not a fan of the obligatory rock guitar solo – and definitely not of flashy athletics – but Alex, I must say, contributes very melodically astute solos. (Whoops, I almost called them “improvisations.” Heh. Not quite.) I won’t go into more detail on these fab four tracks, as they’ve received barrels of commentary and examination over the years, but they are bulletproof.

The remaining cuts in the second half are intriguing, if not as famous. At eleven minutes, “The Camera Eye” is the last hurrah of the “mini-epic” style, although it’s of a different emotional stripe than “Xanadu” or even “Natural Science”. I think the main theme is repeated once or thrice too often, but beyond that, it achieves a special grandeur. The two vocal stanzas observe metropolitan foot traffic in different locales. I consider this to be Neil’s best observational lyric (well, check the title, eh), with lines of admirable economy, perception, and sensitivity toward his fellow primates. Geddy Lee uses keyboards more prominently in this song, while Lifeson turns in yet another dandy guitar lead towards the end. Not the greatest shakedown in Rush history, but very worthy.

“Witch Hunt” is more on the grungy gothic side, offset by loftier chords in the middle and at the end. This is the album’s “studio production” number, and as such, it carries more artificial weight than the others; the drums are even double tracked in one section. The lyric tackles censorship and book banning, etcetera, neatly summed up by the final lines: “Quick to judge, quick to anger / Slow to understand / Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.” It brings the album a dark, solemn air. Finally, there’s “Vital Signs”, a mix of sequenced synth, reggae, rock riffs, great drumming, and lyrical wordplay. You can tell from the choppy guitar chords and drum accents that Rush had heard the Police, an influence that was only just beginning to roost. “Vital Signs” has always topped my list of favorite Rush tunes. Credit to Alex for just sticking to rhythmic chords; a solo would have been way out of place.

I don’t know what else to say about Moving Pictures, except there’s good reason why it is considered a high water mark.


Signals
1982

The influx of Geddy Lee’s keyboards and the waning of Alex Lifeson’s hard edged guitar often leads people to say that this marks a turning point in the group’s operations. I don’t fully agree, because though the sound and arrangements become more spacious, the tone of the material is definitely in line with the preceding two albums. I’d nominate about half the tracks as being among their best, and Signals overall just has a neat atmosphere that I cannot accurately describe. Even when I had discarded Rush, I still kept a copy of this album somewhere. Also, I think it contains some of Neil Peart’s best drumming – listen to “Digital Man” or “The Weapon” for how he runs with the Stewart Copeland rock-reggae style.

While the keyboards expand sonic possibilities, the arrangements are still as tight and clear as those of Moving Pictures. The rhythms groove more, particularly with the aforementioned reggae that informs a few passages. The album starts with the classic “Subdivisions”; normally I’d not praise an adolescent angst song, but Neil’s observations are well versed, and the driving arrangement gets a lot of mileage out of simple elements. “Analog Kid” contrasts uptempo rock verses with a halved refrain of beautiful chords and melody (“You move me, you move me”). “Chemistry” is endurable filler, the one track that suffers from overbearing keyboards. “Digital Man” features intricate rhythmic interplay, from shuffle/swing to tight reggae to a straight “digital” pulse. I don’t know why folks bemoan an absence of guitar on Signals, because the instrument is certainly apparent in “Digital Man” and elsewhere.

Beginning the second half, “The Weapon” melds a sequenced synth pattern, four on the floor drums, and spacious chords into a majestic yet funky song. This is another of my Rush favorites, mostly for Peart’s performance (listen to him during the instrumental section), and Lifeson lends a cool atmospheric solo, too. “New World Man” uses an innocuous synth figure and reggae upbeats to construct a fine pop-rock number, whose lyric I think allegorizes America. The affecting ballad “Losing It” shifts with ethereal grace through different meters, laced with violin. The closing “Countdown” recounts a Space Shuttle launch over alternately tough and uplifting music. Some of Neil’s lines are too literal and cliched, and the NASA radio transmissions might seem geeky from this distance, but I nevertheless find it an inspiring track, especially as it endorses those on the “leading edge of life.” Contrast these aspirations and values with the mindless minutia emphasized in today’s culture, or perhaps the number of bombs detonated by this or that peaceful religion. But I digress. Something I’ve neglected to mention is how much Geddy Lee’s vocals have improved since the banshee rocker days. He sounds quite good on this record.

Recapping: the Waves/Pictures/Signals threesome represents the best Rush had to offer, in my view. Forced to choose one for keeps, I’d pick Signals for subjective reasons.


Grace Under Pressure
1984

I didn’t like this at all when I first heard it, and it wasn’t until a latter-day revisit of Rush that I warmed to it – well, about half of it. Grace continues in much the same musical vein as Signals, but the production is colder and the arrangements more mechanical. Geddy still plays nimble bass, but he can’t keep his fingers off the synthetic black and whites either, claiming the blocky chord parts that were once the guitar’s province. In response, Alex plays furtive and somewhat desperate solos (“Kid Gloves”) and otherwise takes a complementary rhythm role. Neil explores dexterous grooves in a clever yet self-conscious way. (For example, does the ska-like beat in “Enemy Within” need to be so complex?) Throughout, the songs slip into darkness: nuclear war, a deceased friend, a concentration camp, internal strife, and so on. So the 1980s weren’t just pixelated apes and pant-leg bandannas after all.

I wouldn’t say this is a heavy album – this is still Rush we’re talking about – but I appreciate how the songs relate to the album’s title, whether it be the tense scenario of “Red Sector A” or the synopsized historic grind of “Between the Wheels”. I’m moved by the mini-sci-fi story “Body Electric” (except for the binary code chorus), and I dig “Red Lenses” for the sheer bizarreness of it. Meanwhile, the leadoff cuts “Distant Early Warning” and “Afterimage” are rather stiff and minor for my taste. And on that note, even the better tracks betray a frigid sound, as Ged’s bell-like synth patches are a lot glassier than the warmer analog keyboards of previous albums. Throw in the occasional electronic drums, and Rush is primed for their techno-happy years.

Gosh, this review isn’t quite as enthusiastic as I thought it would be. Well, take my disclaimers as a warning if you haven’t heard the album yet. Grace has some fine moments but leaves the resonance of their magic trilogy behind.

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