GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Even more bleak than the chilly "Signals", this album is the winter of RUSH's sound. The 80s were a pretty cold time, emotionally and socially, and this album is a testament to that era. At at time when most bands (even some progressive giants) tried to make upbeat pop songs that failed to evoke anything but artifice and commercialism, RUSH took the harder route by making an emotionally accurate soundscape. "Distant Early Warning" is much more indicative of the spirit of 1984 than, for instance, "Footloose" or "Girls Just Want to Have Fun". Peart demonstrates over and over how far his lyrics have come since "Fly By Night"; gone is the clumsy rhyming and struggling to fit concepts. As a band, RUSH got better with every album; the songs, however, lack the memorable immediacy of the earlier (and later) rock hits or the progressive factor of their classic period. Still, this is a consistently admirable, fascinating work and the last artistically satisfying whole album they would do for almost a decade.