
Snakes and Arrows, Rush’s 18th studio album, came out on May 1, 2007. It was the last Rush album to be distributed by Atlantic, but the first to be produced by Nick Raskulinecz. Snake and Arrows was profoundly progressive, but it was also one of Rush’s blues-iest album, almost certainly influenced by their EP, Feedback, a 30th anniversary tribute to the bands the three members loved in the 1960s. And yet, even the blues on the album is mischievous, an inversion or twisting of blues, propelling the flow into more classical progressive directions.
The album also sees the return of Peart, the cultural critic and observer. The first track, “Far Cry,” begins with the harrowing “Pariah dogs and wandering madmen,” a commentary about the evil in society and those who would sell their own souls and become evil to destroy the other evil. Each, tellingly, is a fundamentalist, “speaking in tongues.” The track begins, musically, with a psychedelic blues feel. This was not the world we thought we would inherit, Peart laments.
It’s a far cry from the world we thought we’d inherit
It’s a far cry from the way we thought we’d share it
You can almost feel the current flowing
You can almost see the circuits blowing
Even when we feel we might actually make something right, the world spins and we find ourselves rolled over.
Track Two, “Armor and Sword,” considers what we might do to protect ourselves and the ones we love from the insanities of the world. Little, it seems.
Confused alarms of struggle and flight
Blood is drained of color
By the flashes of artillery light
No one gets to their heaven without a fight
The battle flags are flown
At the feet of a god unknown
No one gets to their heaven without a fight
Sometimes the damage is too great
Or the will is too weak
What should have been our armor
Becomes a sharp and burning sword
Even when we diagnose our problem and attempt to correct it, we mistake our defense for our offense.
Taken from observations Peart had regarding an older, married couple, “Workin’ Them Angels,” track three of the album, considers the grace of life, the things that go well when we definitely deserve such help.
All my life
I’ve been workin’ them angels overtime
Riding and driving and living
So close to the edge
Workin’ them angels—Overtime
Riding through the Range of Light to the wounded city
Filling my spirit with the wildest wish to fly
Taking the high road to the wounded city
Memory strumming at the heart of a moving picture
Using the same title as a chapter from his memoirs of his bicycle trip across West Africa, The Masked Rider, Peart reflects on justice and injustice in the fourth track, “The Larger Bowl.” Why does one person have so much while another has nothing? Why does one do little but find everything he needs to live well, while another works his entire life but experiences disaster after disaster? “It’s somehow so badly arranged,” he laments.
These first four songs really serve as a prelude to the album that is Snakes and Arrows, as track five, “Spindrift,” begins a relentless journey of majesty until track thirteen, “We Hold On.” If there’s a flaw in any of these nine tracks, this author has missed them. Peart earns his natural historian hat as he considers the natural phenomenon of “spin drift,” the lyrics matching the music perfectly—haunting, swirling, and mesmerizing.
As the waves crash in
On the western shore
It makes me feel uneasy
The spray that’s torn away
Is an image of the way I feel
The same happens with relationships, too. “What am I supposed to say?” the lyricist pleads. “Where are the words to answer you, when you talk that way?”
After a rocking instrumental, “The Main Monkey Business,” the lyrics return with “The Way the Wind Blows” and the listener experiences the perfect inversion of the traditional blues rock song. With a title harkening back to Bob Dylan, the song begins with a standard blues rock guitar progression. At forty-five seconds into the song, the rhythm changes completely, and the track becomes a swirling mass of prog and, frankly, beautiful, driving confusion, but complete with a refrain that might have come from a Crosby, Stills, and Nash protest song, circa 1968. In many ways, “The Way the Wind Blows” is Rush’s finest statement of purpose in their four decades of existence. Lyrically, it mocks those who would allow the times and the spirit of the times—especially if fundamentalist and anti-rational—to sweep over them and to shape their fate.
Now it’s come to this
Hollow speeches of mass deception
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Like crusaders in unholy alliance
Now it’s come to this
Like we’re back in the Dark Ages
From the Middle East to the Middle West
It’s a plague that resists all science
It seems to leave them partly blind
And they leave no child behind
While evil spirits haunt their sleep
While shepherds bless and count their sheep
Again, as if to tweek the band’s critics, an instrumental—“Hope”—comes after “The Way the Wind Blows,” followed by Peart’s updated version of “Free Will,” “Faithless.”
I don’t have faith in faith
I don’t believe in belief
You can call me faithless
But I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that’s faith enough for me
The song is a paean to individualism and freedom of rational decision making.
Track ten, “Bravest Face,” embraces even the smallest things of life, while also recognizing—much like “Lock and Key” (1987)—that each person has a number of levels to his or her emotional desires and the manifested will. Lifeson’s guitar blazes with blues riffs.
Track eleven, “Good News First,” adamantly challenges one of Ayn Rand’s most important philosophical concepts, the premise of the “benevolent universe.”
The best we can agree on
Is it could have been worse
What happened to your old
“Benevolent universe”
You know the one with stars
That revolve around you
Beaming down full of promises
To bring good news
As if to put an exclamation point on the previous song, thus challenging Rand’s egoism, Rush follows it with a brief instrumental entitled “Malignant Narcissism.”
The final track, “We Hold On,” once again offers a Stoic determinism. How many times, it asks, are we ready to give up, to surrender, and to flee. Winston Churchill supposedly once claimed that if you’re going through hell, make sure you keep going. This is Peart’s sentiment as well.
Keep going until dawn
How many times must another line be drawn
We could be down and gone
But we hold on
While the press had come to love Rush after Peart’s tragedies, and a multitude of stories about the band appeared almost everywhere throughout the media, very few sources actually reviewed Snakes and Arrows. Nastily, Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars, claiming “If you’re Rush fan, add two stars; if not, subtract two.” In contrast, their old British stalwart, Geoff Barton, proclaimed the album glorious. “The masters are back. They have assumed control.”
The above is taken from pp. 109-113 of NEIL PEART: CULTURAL (RE)PERCUSSIONS (2015).
Pshhh,Yeah…………ROLLING-STONE can SUCK ON IT!!! I’ve NEVER read any of their one-sided garbage anyway!!!
Anyhoo…………Despite me LOVING Peart’s lyrics in this album (as with ANY RUSH-ALBUM)…………I’ve never been a Lover of “bluesy” rock if You will………so obviously,I wasn’t able to really “feel” the songwriting in this album (which was sad for me) but that in NO-WAY………means that I dislike this album!!! For Neil’s writing ALWAYS finds a way to “connect” with me!!! 🙂 NICELY written review Sir-Brad!!! ~Peace~
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I understand, Indieun7. The blues don’t come to me easily, either. But, when they’re good, they’re really, really good. Old Jethro Tull especially.
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Yes Brad,You definitely make an excellent point in saying that!!! (and Yup,I CANNOT deny old Jethro Tull either!!! No matter how hard I try!!! LOL.) 😉
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Lol. Love me some “Cross-Eyed Mary”!!! 😉
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