SIGNALS

I may be in opposition here, but in my opinion Signals was a bad step backwards by Rush, or rather it was an album where they gave in to the fashionable sound of the time (1982). All the synths and chart-pop-like melodies are soooo 1980's . I liked this album in the early eighties when I first heard it, but nowadays it makes me just sigh. It simply hasn't stood the test of time.

'Subdivisions' opens the record with a melody that wouldn't have been too out of place in the Eurovision song contest in the eighties (sorry, if I'm a bit harsh here), and the better songs ('Analog Kid') cannot rescue the album. To me, Rush's tour de force was in those powerful and a bit aggressive songs of the mid- and late 70's. Never mind the exteremely naïve lyrics (like By-Tor and the Snow Dog), in Signals they missed something very honest and original that they had previously had. Unfortunately the same can be said of most of Rush's 1980's material.