TEST FOR ECHO

This album cannot decide if it wants to be the great COUNTERPARTS or the mediocre ROLL THE BONES, with songs splitting the difference between the two. Sometimes, this results in winners, like "Driven", which is one of RUSH's best songs and indicates that they REALLY like KING'S X, or the title track, which, despite it's silly lyrics, offers some great music. If anything though, the lyrics keep cropping up again and again as terribly awkward and disjointed, reaching a pinnacle of awful in "Dog Years", which features the line, I am not kidding: "It's not the season of the witch / It's the season of the bitch" or something to that effect. It is beyond cringe-worthy.

However, some of the more middling songs are still solid, like "Time and Motion" or "Totem". The instrumental "Limbo" features parts that would appear again and again in NEIL PEART's wonderful drum solos and the aforementioned "Time and Motion" sounds like a time-displaced song from SNAKES & ARROWS, which is great in my book. However, there are too many awkward moments, like "Resist", or "Virtuality", or "Dog Years". I picked this up because I am a collector and I knew of some great songs. Normally, this ends with me saying that the album deserves three stars for the quality of the good songs. This time, though, I can't say that honestly. Roll the Bones is a three-star album because it has great songs and middling songs, as with HOLD YOUR FIRE. This, however, features great songs and easily the worst songs Rush has ever recorded. A Rush fan should check it out, I feel, to get a sense of where the ideas from VAPOR TRAILS forward would come from, but no one else. Two stars.