If you’re into Rush or comics, you should check this out. If you’re into Rush and comics, you must check this out.
A nice five-page preview of the fourth (of six) issue. Story by Neil Peart and Kevin J. Anderson, artwork by Nick Robles (and Hugh Syme).
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=preview&id=22851
You have experienced this during your own listening:
Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that’s 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud.
As Ethan Smith has written, the problem is with us all over the place:
Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.
But audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the “dynamic range,” minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness.
“When there’s no quiet, there can be no loud,” said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording’s dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones.
The problem even extends to vinyl releases, as Angry Metal Guy chronicles:
Labels are also looking to cash in on vinyl’s new found popularity, and so there’s plenty of lazily produced, poor sounding special edition reissues out there. And even with new vinyl, there’s never a guarantee of a dedicated, dynamic master, only the possibility. If the vinyl is sourced from the CD, it will sound every bit as bad.
In short, the problem here is that the ability to turn the music up to 11 should reside with the listener, not the mastering engineer:
There is a major difference between manipulating the recorded volume versus the playback one. When a mastering engineer artificially pushes the volume higher by applying massive amounts of DRC, he or she is changing the recorded volume by squashing the high and low ends of the frequency spectrum. This process has the nasty byproduct of causing transients and imaging to substantially degrade, making the music sound lifeless and dull.
The are many reasons why this huge problem persists today.
But one of the big myths (“metal should go to 11”) can be debunked quantitatively:
One of the most pervasive myths in metal production today is that because metal is supposed to be played loud, it has to be recorded loud. This could not be further from the truth. Some of the most popular metal albums in history are also some of the most dynamic. Master of Puppets: DR12. Rust In Peace: DR13. Painkiller: DR11. Reign In Blood: D14. Notice anything similar about these albums? They were all released prior to 1992, which is roughly the start of the Loudness War. From that year onward, the entire music industry began to engage in constant one-upmanship. Not only did every new album have to be louder than the one that preceded it, but louder than the other guy’s new album as well. By the late ‘90s everyone began to settle around DR6, which is where we are now. Why DR6? Because that’s as loud as you can possibly go while still attempting to hold on to some semblance of fidelity. DR6 is far from ideal, but for every point of dynamic range lost below that mark, you begin to do exponentially more damage to the sound.
A big problem with the industry today is that if you’re on a major label, chances are they won’t let you release an album with high levels of dynamics even if you wanted too. If you send them a fully dynamic master, they’ll think there’s something wrong with it and hire an engineer to smash it down to DR6 before sending it off to the CD pressing plant. …
The truth is that most bands simply have no idea that the DR5 and DR6 masters used on the vast majority of new CD releases are not something people actually want. I know that it’s going to be a long and uphill battle to change the minds of the executives at the major labels, but most bands on small labels generally have a fair amount of creative freedom in terms of what they can do with their masters. So if enough of you let them know that you want them to release albums with proper dynamics, they will listen.
Prog should definitely lead the way out of this morass. Why shouldn’t every self-respecting prog artist proudly and prominently place a DR number on the back of every CD they produce? It could be a way of self-identifying yourself as a serious prog artist committed to only the best sonic experience.
If not, maybe the DR Database needs to be in every reviewer’s toolkit. But keep in mind this caveat that the Dynamic Range number is just the beginning of a discussion about an artist’s musical release, and not the final word on its evaluation:
DR6 is now the industry average and already considered by most sane engineers as too compressed. The recommended level by most industry experts is DR8 or higher. A bit of a fair warning though, a higher number doesn’t necessarily mean its sounds better, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, it usually does. And applying DRC is not evil in itself either, provided it’s done judiciously. The fact is DRC is an invaluable tool that can make a good sounding record sound great. I highly encourage you to read some of our in-depth articles about dynamic range and why it’s not about the numbers, but about the sound.
So I’m sure you’re wondering though, why sacrifice the music’s fidelity just to make it sound artificially loud?
It stems from the fact that at least initially, our ears perceive louder as sounding better, and labels and artists try to leverage that fact in order to gain market share. The idea is simple, if a label’s roster sounds louder than its competitor, you, the listener, will tend to gravitate toward that label’s louder tracks than the other guy’s softer ones.
Perhaps the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx were objecting to the acoustic guitar because of its magnificent dynamic range.
Attention all planets of the Prog Federation: DR6 has assumed control…
Take off, eh! It’s a beauty way to go (to school):
Rush 101: Canadian Prog-Rockers Are Now A University Course
It only took 40 years, but this fall the notoriously complex prog-rock of Canadian legends Rush will the subject of a course at Tiffin University in Ohio.
In case you didn’t know, 40 years ago today:
On this day in history 40 years ago, a young drummer from St. Catharines named Neil Peart officially joined Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee in RUSH… which is the line-up that has remained the same for the last four decades.
Happy Anniversary RUSH!
Virtual high-fives to all the fans for the last 40 years!
It is with great pleasure that I share with you a truly excellent prog metal album. Between July 1 and July 4, I selected my four favorite releases of the year thus far; over the past few days, I have been sharing them with you. I conclude that series of posts now with the album that I suspect will end up being ranked by me as Album of the Year when December rolls around.
Son of Aurelius was a technical death metal band that has now grown into an innovative and unique prog metal band. Actually, what they do defies genre categorization. They even engage in a critique of the entire notion of “prog” here in the lyrics to track six, “Attack on Prague” (a clever variant spelling of “Prog”):
Freedom from impulse
has never been required more
than it is in relation to the state we’re in,
and it will take so much more
than progressive metal can hope to achieve
With all of its intention and spacey themes.
The band’s first release, The Farthest Reaches (2010), stuck solely with the genre’s usual monochromatic death metal vocals over top of technically accomplished metal. Now on this sophomore release, they have evolved musically and exited from the sub-sub-genre ghetto of death metal but incorporated the best of those sub-sub-genre tropes into a much, much greater musical accomplishment. I am struck by the level of transformation here, and to use an analogy that Progarchy readers will understand, it seems to me something like the difference between Rush’s first album and their second album. Under a Western Sun (2014) appears to be Son of Aurelius’ Fly by Night. In case you miss my point: with this release, we are now in the presence of true musical greatness.
There are fifteen tracks on this entirely independently-produced release. The old death metal screams and growls are incorporated here only as a smaller part of the full palette of an astonishingly dynamic range of vocals. Rather than death metal vocals for the sake of death metal vocals, Riley McShane’s screaming here is intelligently deployed simply as part of the emotional variation within the songs. The impact is incredibly effective and gives the sonic experience a unique range and power.
I think of the album’s fifteen tracks in three groups of five. First, there are five lengthy, mind-blowingly epic prog metal tracks:
2. Chorus of the Earth (7:11)
3. The Weary Wheel (6:46)
6. Attack on Prague (6:03)
13. Long Ago (6:53)
14. Under a Western Sun (7:15)
The technical virtuosity is amazing on every one of these tracks. If you want to have an experience similar to being a teenager listening to Neil Peart for the first time, listen to what Spencer Edwards does with his drumming: you will be astonished to discover that a human being is capable of making sounds like this on a drum kit. It is hard to pick a favorite track, because everything here is truly superb. Cary Geare on guitar and Max Zigman on bass will blow your mind with their unbridled excellence. There are even acoustic guitars and keyboards here and there, which showcases the musical intelligence and compositional skill of the band as they create prog soundscapes on an epic scale.
If I had to single out a favorite moment and a favorite track, it would be track 13, “Long Ago,” where Riley McShane at 4:09 holds the last syllable of the last word he sings in the chorus in an extended rock and roll yell over top of the blistering guitar power chords and the enfilading fire of the drum kit. It’s a truly transcendent moment, because it takes a few seconds for you to realize that Riley is not letting go of that note… and then he just keeps on going and going, for a whole twenty seconds! Unlike Roger Daltrey’s famous yell in “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which telegraphs what it is about to do, this yell sneaks up on you instead. But it too delivers a truly great rock and roll moment that is no less classic.
Every one of these five lengthier tracks is a mini-masterpiece, and together they actually add up to the length of a regular vinyl album of five-star rank. But the band is kind enough to share more music with us, and so we get a CD that is 72:15 in total length. Let me tell you about the rest of it, which is like having ten bonus tracks added on to an already five-star classic prog metal album.
The second group of five tracks includes four instrumentals, and one more track, “The Prison Walls,” which, unlike the other vocal tracks on this release, is nothing but growling death metal vocals, and hence it harkens back to the old style of their first album:
1. Return to Arms (2:42)
7. Flailing Saints (1:19)
11. The Prison Walls (5:55)
12. Submerge & Surface (3:03)
15. Strange Aeons (2:29)
Personally, I find these exclusively growling death metal vocals completely boring and I can barely stand listening to track eleven. I feel my I.Q. dropping as the dumb growls plod on and on — although the demented riffing on the track does make for some great crazy metal music. There is an excellent instrumental break at about the three-minute mark, and so usually I just fast-forward to that, if I don’t skip the song entirely. I guess this track is a sop to the fans who loved their first album, but I just think it is time to grow and move on and leave this sort of thing behind. It works when it is deployed in very small doses as part of an escalating dynamic range, as within the five epic prog-length tracks, but on its own it is musically very dull.
“Flailing Saints” and “Strange Aeons” are brief fade-in and fade-out instrumental outtakes, but “Return to Arms” and “Submerge & Surface” are fully coherent instrumental wholes that are very, very impressive. If you want a quick sample of the band’s virtuosity, try out those two tracks. I especially love the bass solo on “Submerge & Surface,” because it explodes into an unexpected burst of feedback at the end. The instrumentation and arrangement is top-notch on these purely musical tracks. They work well in bringing variation and interest to an already stellar album.
The last group of five tracks consists of carefully-crafted songs that are shorter in length, but still packed with the musical virtuosity that is the hallmark of Son of Aurelius:
4. Coloring the Soul (3:56)
5. The Stoic Speaks (4:46)
8. A Great Liberation (5:27)
9. Clouded Panes (4:28)
10. Blinding Light (4:15)
“Coloring the Soul” and “The Stoic Speaks” give us lyrics sung from the perspective of a Marcus Aurelius character who seems to be standing outside of time. “Coloring the Soul” even sings at the end a quote from the Emperor’s actual Meditations:
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
The band gets its name from the successor Emperor, Commodus, who on their first release was changed by the lyrics into a fictional, super-powered lunatic. But on this release, the “son” of Marcus Aurelius could be anyone listening to the album who is spiritually attuned to what the lyrics are singing about — a “spiritual son” of Marcus Aurelius, in other words. Perhaps something of that vision even informs the lyrics to the epic track “Long Ago,” which could be giving voice to the album’s Marcus Aurelius character, standing outside of time, viewing the trajectory of the Roman Empire, and lamenting the way the world has gone.
Tracks eight, nine, and ten are all very different, but yet each one finishes up with a highly creative outro. Each outro is very satisfying and unexpected and impressive. “A Great Liberation” has screaming death metal vocals throughout, but while the growling ones on track eleven, “The Prison Walls,” are boring, these screaming ones at least have an interesting expressive dimension, and they actually work very well with the incredible music that comprises “A Great Liberation.”
The track “Clouded Panes” is a good short introduction if you can only play one short song for someone to show the truly amazing range of which Son of Aurelius is musically capable. Again, it’s hard to pick any favorites, but one of mine is “Blinding Light,” which for the first few minutes sounds exactly like it could be a Big Big Train song! But then, at the transition into the outro, power chords come ripping in unexpectedly, and Big Big Train turns into… Son of Aurelius! It’s an awesome moment. The vocals by Riley McShane are really great here, especially his quiet clean vocals which then erupt into rock singing. This is the stuff of greatness.
Son of Aurelius are the real deal. Don’t miss this album. It’s a special accomplishment and will doubtless be our Prog Metal Album of the Year.
Son of Aurelius — Under a Western Sun
Max Zigman – Bass
Spencer Edwards – Drums
Cary Geare – Lead Guitar
Riley McShane – Vocals
Progarchist Rating: 10/10 ★★★★★
After spending my first afternoon at the University of Colorado, I stopped by Time Warp Comics (http://www.time-warp.com). As it turns out, Neil Peart, Kevin J. Anderson, and Nick Robles have been producing a six-part comic book series of Clockwork Angels.
The first three issues are out, and I was even able to purchase a signed (by Anderson) copy of issue 1.
And, equally important, I found out that several of the guys working at Time Warp are proggers. They were also just–not surprisingly–fantastic guys (and a gal). So, a huge thanks to Clayton, Garrett, Michael, and Georgia!
What a store. I’ll certainly be stopping by again.
If you’re in Boulder, make sure you check out Time Warp.
Thanks, Gianna! You have saved me a bit of time by introducing the new Vanden Plas. Allow me to add my track-by-track impressions to your superb set-up.
I really like this disc a lot and have selected it as one of my star-spangled picks for this July 4. Chronicles Of The Immortals is an excellent album, destined for the year-end Top Ten. It’s definitely one of my mid-year five-star picks.
Track one (3:52) starts off with a spoken-word introduction that together with the background music and a bit of singing builds a sense of anticipation. Then track two “The Black Knight” (8:29) lets us know we are unquestionably in excellently epic prog-metal territory. By the time track three “Godmaker” (5:24) kicks in, any doubts about whether or not the listener is in the presence of something extraordinary will have been removed. Clearly, this is an organically coherent compositional tour-de-force.
Track four (1:39) is a bit of a prelude that lets us catch our breath. But then track five “A Ghost’s Requiem” (3:56) is a completely surprising and unexpected transmogrification of sacred music tropes. This brilliant track cements the disc’s five-star status and forms a musical launch pad for the mind-blowing tracks that follow. Track six “New Vampyre” (6:16) and track seven “The King and the Children of Lost World” (7:52) continue to elevate the disc to new heights, which is quite astonishing, because standard practice is to lead an album with your finest material but here we have an unfolding organic whole and its accelerating excellence becomes more and more manifest.
Track eight “Misery Affection” (5:08) mellows out a bit and displays another side of the band’s remarkable skills. But just when we have been soothed by the stunning beauty of that brief pause in the intense metallic action, we are overwhelmed by track nine “Soul Alliance” (6:39), which together with its successor, track ten “Inside” (6:42), are my favorite parts the album, because their instrumentation and composition is sheer perfection. Together they tie together the entire album and bring things to conclusion in a brilliant way.
The final track, in fact, is absolutely the most satisfying conclusion to an epic concept album whole that I have heard in a long time. Really, I can’t recall feeling such excitement, other than with the similar way it feels to listen to the end of “2112” by Rush. The last two minutes of Chronicles Of The Immortals are pure dopamine-infused prog bliss. As those gigantic concluding waves of chords wash over us in the last two minutes, I am even reminded of some Rush tropes from the first half of the eighties.
Thanks, Vanden Plas. You have given us one of the greatest, most essential prog albums I have ever heard. What an amazing gift you have shared with us.
Vanden Plas — Chronicles Of The Immortals: Netherworld (Path 1)
Progarchist Rating: ★★★★★
Happy Dominion Day from the Great White North — a.k.a., the home of RUSH!
“Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae” (Ps 72:8)
Citizens of Progarchy have been celebrating by drafting lists of their Top Ten Rush Albums EVER.
We have heard from Erik, Kevin, Brad, RJP, and Drew.
Et moi:
1. Moving Pictures 1981
2. Permanent Waves 1980
3. A Farewell To Kings 1977
4. Hemispheres 1978
5. 2112 1976
6. Signals 1982
7. Grace Under Pressure 1984
8. Power Windows 1985
9. Counterparts 1993
10. Fly By Night 1975
Next, to rock in a truly star-spangled Fourth, stay tuned to Progarchy.com …
… because over the next couple of days I will be revealing — halfway through the year — some of the utterly essential five-star albums of upper-echelon excellence already released in 2014, clearly destined for my end-of-year Top Ten.
Who needs to wait for the end of the year? It seems the best prog is already here!
So, prepare to celebrate …
Ok, so I’m sitting at work today just minding my own business and getting things done when an email comes in from WordPress. It asks me to approve a couple of pingbacks to a piece I had written about the incredible Rush album, Moving Pictures. Well, the next thing you know, I’m seeing several posts about Rush’s top 10 albums, as well as a few regarding top prog albums or top long-form prog pieces. So now, instead of working, I’m spending at least an hour reading Progarchy posts instead of working. You guys are destroyers of discipline!!!
😉
Although I’m usually not one for lists that require ranking, the invitation to rank the top 10 Rush albums has proven to be irresistible to me. So, without further ado, here we go:
1) Moving Pictures: I’ve written extensively about this one, so I’ll just add the link here.
2) Grace Under Pressure: When this album came out, I was a few months shy of 20 years old, and in the Navy. At the time, I was stationed in Newport News, VA, as the submarine upon which I would serve, the USS Olympia, SSN 717 (Este Paratus) was under construction in the docks at Newport News Shipbuilding. While an attack submarine and not a ballistic missile sub, the Olympia would be configured to carry Tomahawk land attack missiles with nuclear warheads. The Cold War was heating up, and our main adversaries, the Soviet Union, had three submarines for every one of ours. And my job, as a sonar technician, was going to be to find theirs before they found us. In short, there was a certain “heaviness” in my life at the time. That made the timing of this album absolutely perfect. Lyrically, this is the heaviest album Rush has ever done. The pressures of life, both great and small, weave their way through this album. Indeed, like many of my shipmates, I felt like “the world weighs on my shoulders” at that time. This album resonated. It also has some outstanding music on it, and like Moving Pictures, it has an almost perfect balance between guitars and keyboards.
3) 2112: The theme of resonating continues here. There are a number Rush albums other than those listed that I like better than this from a musical perspective. But this one resonates on a different level and thus gets a high ranking on this list. As I recounted here, around the same time I first heard this album, I had numerous conversations with my maternal grandmother, who along with the rest my mother’s immediate family, was a refugee from what was then communist East Germany. The individual vs. the state, freedom vs. tyranny, individualism vs. collectivism – all those themes of the conversations with my grandmother were echoed in the lyrics of the title suite. This was the first time I had really contemplated lyrics that were about larger things in the world. And because of this, I always paid more attention to Rush lyrics than I would with other bands, always looking for deeper meaning and larger truths. This carried over to side 2 of the album, as the messages contained within Lessons and Something for Nothing led me to realize that while I was fortunate enough to have been born in a relatively free country, it was my own responsibility to make the most, and best, of that freedom.
4) Clockwork Angels: I am simply gobsmacked that a band that has been around as long as Rush can be this creative this late in their career. My first true prog love, Yes, was a great band for a while, but they haven’t been creatively great in decades, instead mostly living off of past glories (although what incredible glories they were). Rush on the other hand, despite having some incredibly glorious moments in their own musical past, has never rested on them. Instead, they pushed themselves forward and continued to create great music, and really hit a home run here. I love the lyrics in this album, which open themselves to a number of interpretations. Whereas Brad has found themes of small-r republican liberty and individualism within them, I have found a lot of Stoic wisdom weaving its way through Neil’s words, particularly in the latter half of the album as the protagonist starts to have one epiphany after another. I have little doubt that Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius would readily understand messages contained within The Garden. Throw in some great guitar work, the excellent bass work, and the always stellar drums, and you’ve got a recipe for greatness, age of the cooks be damned.
5) Power Windows: Controversial to some because of the keyboards, but not to these ears. This is a great collection of songs. With all of the malfeasance in the financial markets and corruption of the political system, The Big Money seems even more relevant today than when it was released. Middletown Dreams is a great meditation on the quiet desperation of some ordinary lives. I loved Marathon when this album was first released and the wisdom contained in the lyrics has only become more evident as I have piled on the years. And Grand Designs is a great critique of lowest common denominator pop culture and the struggle to maintain integrity within. There is some great playing on this album, such as Geddy Lee’s bass during Marathon and some blistering guitar work by Alex Lifeson on The Big Money. This album has definitely earned its place in the top 5.
6) Hemispheres: This is the most overtly prog album Rush ever did, at least in the 70’s sense of the word. The title suite that encompasses the side 1 of the original LP was a thing of beauty, with excellence in all phases: guitar, bass, drums, and lyrics. In the overarching theme of Hemispheres, Peart provides more wisdom to latch onto and live by. The Trees is a great metaphor for the perils of enforced equality. And La Villa Strangiato is one of the most fascinatingly complex instrumentals ever done by any rock band.
7) Permanent Waves: Like Moving Pictures, this is a transitional album, as the transition of Rush from the 70’s to the 80’s really took two steps. The first step was here, as they pared down some of the excess of the previous three albums. The most well-known song is, of course, The Spirit of Radio, about the tension between art and commerce and maintaining one’s integrity through the same. Several other great tracks are here too. The thunderstorm imagery invoked by Jacob’s Ladder is a thing of lyrical beauty, while Free Will, Different Strings, and Entre Nous are all excellent in their own right. But it is the mini-epic Natural Science that really puts this album over the top for me. I was finally able to witness the performance of this song live on the Snakes and Arrows tour, and it was one of those moments I will never forget.
8) Vapor Trails: This album just screams TRIUMPH!!! After the well-documented tragedies, travels, and searching for answers, Rush returned from a near death of their own with a spectacular album. One Little Victory taught us to take joy in even the smallest victories, while the title song reminds us of our transitory nature. Ghost Rider takes us on the road with Neil, while Secret Touch implores us to have the fortitude to endure. The underrated gem and favorite track for me on this album is Earthshine, with it’s amazement at nature’s beauty. This is a statement album by Rush, and that statement was, emphatically, “we are BACK!”
9) A Farewell to Kings: The title track, Cinderella Man, Cygnus X-1 and Madrigal are all excellent tracks in their own right. But the two tracks that really make this albums are the anthem Closer to the Heart and the epic Xanadu. These became two of my favorite Rush tracks upon initially hearing them and they remain so to this day. That being said, the one downside of this album for me is the production, which was a bit harsh and dry. Particularly with Xanadu, I’ve always preferred the live version from Exit Stage Left over the studio version.
10) Signals: This is a difficult album for some, mainly due to the fact that it is probably the most keyboard dominated Rush album, and thus Lifeson’s guitar often gets lost in the mix. That’s still not enough to knock it out of my top 10, as the songs are still just too good. Subdivisions is another Rush anthem, one full of great insights and even more wisdom. For guitar excellence, The Analog Kid and New World Man are two tracks where it didn’t get lost in the mix. And while few others would mention it, the heart of my inner space geek is warmed to no end by Countdown, which ultimately celebrates humanity’s ability to create and do great things.
Looking at the other lists of best Rush albums here, it’s evident that each of us differs somewhat from one another in our preferences. And I myself will agonize over some of the albums left off the list. I’ve listed ten albums above which I consider to be truly great albums, and I’ve had to wonder if I should have had others on the list. But how many bands ever release ten great albums? Neither The Beatles, nor prog-gods Yes, nor 70’s icons Led Zeppelin can claim to have ten great albums in their catalog (Zeppelin didn’t even get ten studio albums total, unless you count the posthumous Coda). In comparison, some of the albums that didn’t make my list (or that of others) are truly great albums. And therein lies yet another testament to the true greatness, the unparalleled excellence that is Rush.
The game is ON!
Chris Morrissey and our Fearless Leader, Brad Birzer, have issued a “Top 10 Rush Albums” challenge. In fact, Brad’s was pointed right at me via Twitter, so how can I say no?
This assignment was so easy, it was done on my lunch hour.
In order:
1. Moving Pictures (1981). Two months ago this week, I penned what this album means to me. I’ll add no more here.
2. Permanent Waves (1980). Released on January 1, 1980, the album that thrust Rush into the mainstream grabbed my upon my first listen and never let go. Rush managed to blend epics and epic playing with a modern, urgent sound to remind everyone thinking they were just another bloated, long-song prog band that they were instead a progressive, HARD ROCK band.
3. Hemispheres (1978). The group’s most progressive album, sporting just four tracks in the vein of “Close To The Edge,” is fantastic from start to finish. They just played their asses off on this one. While most will point to “La Villa Strangiato,” the oft-played “The Trees” or even the album-side sequel to “Cygnus X-1” as the best tracks, I’ve always been partial to “Circumstances” the same way I’m fond of “Entre Nous” on “Permanent Waves” (both side two openers, by the way).
4. A Farewell To Kings (1977). Yes, I’ve now listed my top four Rush albums in reverse chronological order of release, but for me, 1977-81 was truly the band’s landmark period. “Xanadu” alone makes this a great album for me, as does “Cygnus X-1”, but while I rarely – which is to say, never – make a fuss of lyrics on albums, the sad truth is that Neil Peart’s lyrics in the title track ring true more and more with each passing year.
5. Power Windows (1985). While some may give “Signals” and Grace Under Pressure” a hard time for various song-related reasons, my issue with both of those albums wasn’t the songs…it was the production. Both sounded either flat and/or muddy to me, but all that changed in the first few seconds of “The Big Money,” the opener to “Power Windows.” Heck, they could have just called it “The Big Album,” because producer Peter Collins – referred to by the group as “Mr. Big” – and his team just made this album shine. Huge tracks and big themes populate this gem of a release.
6. Roll The Bones (1991). After the synth and sequencer-heavy “Hold Your Fire,” producer Rupert Hine was determined to get Rush back to its power trio roots and certainly did so with “Presto,” but for me, “Roll The Bones” took it one step further. Yes, there are songs on “Roll The Bones” that probably rival those on “Presto” – “Show Don’t Tell” vs. “Dreamline” and “Superconductor” vs. “The Big Wheel” – but in “RTB” we got our first instrumental since “YYZ” with “Where’s My Thing,” plus “Roll The Bones” features not one, but two brilliant tracks that tug at the heartstrings in “Bravado” and “Ghost of a Chance.” Those more than make up for the last two tracks on the album – “Neurotica” and “You Bet Your Life,” which I can do without.
This brings me to the point when I have to really think about what the last four are and in what order. Thinking…comparing…contrasting…okay, here goes:
7. Counterparts (1993). I can’t believe I’m putting this before the album at #8, but aside from a production superior to the previous two releases – “Presto” and “Roll The Bones” – and despite a bunch of standout tracks, Rush saved it’s best for last with the highly-emotional “Everyday Glory.” Prog bands rarely get points for squeezing emotion out of songs, but Rush just nailed it with this sad-yet-hopeful track.
8. Signals (1982). Certainly one of the biggest 180-degree turns made by a prog band between albums – rivaled by the “Drama” to “90125” succession – Rush’s first attempt to wedge its formidable musicianship into an album’s worth of shorter tracks was a triumph. We can point to the beautifully-structured “Subdivisions” and the band’s only U.S. Top 40 hit in “New World Man” – written only to balance out the lengths of the two sides as bands were still considering vinyl back then – but how about Alex Lifeson’s blazing solo in “The Analog Kid?” How about Geddy Lee’s and Peart’s work in “Digital Man?” How about Rush’s first attempt at a four-on-the-floor track with “The Weapon?” Owwwwooooo! Scaddddy! 🙂
9. Grace Under Pressure (1984). A somewhat muddy production mars Peter “Hentor” Henderson’s time with the band, and if you read Peart’s notes from the GuP tourbook, this one was certainly recorded under pressure, but Rush continued to explore how to fit their chops into shorter tunes and mostly succeeded with gems such as “Distant Early Warning,” “Red Sector A,” the jazz-tinged “Red Lenses” and “we can still fit 5/4 into a song” with “Kid Gloves.” Once again, the band saved its best for last with the amazing “Between The Wheels” with its haunting intro and verses, giving way to a gorgeous, big chorus (note: I’m a sucker for a big chorus).
10. Snakes and Arrows (2007). The batch of “new millennium” Rush albums have been a bit of a mixed bag for me. “Vapor Trails” was the album the band simply had to make (and get through) in the wake of Peart’s personal tragedies, and it was reflected in that fragile recording. While many welcomed the first full concept album from Rush in “Clockwork Angels,” I guess I was well past the point where I wanted to absorb a concept album, plus I find myself skipping through a lot of the tracks save for “Caravan,” the title track and the magnificent “The Garden.” In between those two albums is the best of the bunch, and while there are some forgettable tracks for me, I do love works such as “Far Cry,” “Bravest Face,” “Armor and Sword,” “Workin’ Them Angels,” and “The Way The Wind Blows.”
Well then, I’m sure to be lambasted for ignoring “2112,” let alone the releases before it. They all have their respective places in Rush history and in moving the band towards what they’d become, but they just don’t do a ton for me. If it makes anyone feel better, though, “2112” would have come in at #11.
So…there. Back to work(in’ them angels). You can lambast me for that.
Progarchy 