ROLL THE BONES

In my eyes, ROLL THE BONES has only four good tracks, those being "Dreamline", the title track, "Where's My Thing?" and "Ghost of a Chance". These four show strong growth in RUSH's signature sound, which is a combination of progressive rock, hard rock, and pop rock. More on those later.

First, I want to talk about why the other tracks leave me cold. It mainly has to do with what feel, to me, like cheap tricks of '90s songwriting, things that we thankfully are not bombarded with anymore. A kind of ham-fisted wide-eyed sound brought about by bands trying to copy U2's bombast. I am not saying that Rush is trying to copy U2 directly, but the sound definitely affected production and, in turn, how songs and sounds were structured. As a result, we get a lot of songs that, while dark, sound very cheesy. What's worse is that they are filled with cool guitar, drum, and bass parts, like the drum pattern in the cheesy synth outro of "Heresy" or the guitars in "The Big Wheel". They indicate strong ideas that just never really take form into something strong enough to really compel me to come back.

Admittedly, I throw this album on every now and again to see if my feelings have changed and discover other cool instrumental nuggets, but for the most part, I've lifted my four favorites off onto a Rush mix I made of cool songs from albums I don't really dig. "Ghost of a Chance" is another subtle, atmospheric ballad in the vein of POWER WINDOWS-style songwriting, featuring incredibly grim lyrics that could have been culled from GRACE UNDER PRESSURE scraps. The title track features an upbeat feel that reminds me of "Superconductor" from PRESTO, an album I love. "Where's My Thing?" is spacey and proggy and full of great musical interplay and ideas that really work together, while "Dreamline" is one of Rush's best songs, even if the lyrics are a little clumsy. It indicates where they would go with their next album COUNTERPARTS, indicating a trend of borrowing sounds from people influenced by them I'll cover more in depth on the next two albums.

A good album and worth it for Rush fans. It has some good songs you should lift from it, but after copying those to your computer from the disc, I'd put it away unless you want to poke around a bit. Three stars.