HOLD YOUR FIRE

This album should really be re-titled "Hold Your Creativity" since despite a whole bunch of guest stars adding their input to it seems like a whole lotta filler to me. I also vote that they repackage it and instead of the three red dots on the cover they should be tomatoes being thrown at the faces of the three members (the cute pics of them with their hip new wave hairdos in the liner notes would do nicely). I suspect at this point that their fan base who was so patiently waiting for another at least decent album again were ready to pull plug on their support. In fact they did just that. This album saw a huge decline in sales which was the thunderbolt that caused RUSH to tone down the synths on their following album.

HOLD YOUR FIRE is their 12th studio album and one of the weakest IMO. I find the first three tracks tolerable and the rest absolutely horrendous and tolerable isn't good enough for a band with this much talent. Listening to this I can only wonder what planet RUSH was living on at the time. I know that they were doing what they wanted and were experimenting with ideas that all the members had wanted to follow, but I can only wonder WHY these particular ideas that they seemed to put so much into to make happen sound so, well, awful. Another good title for this would be HOLD YOUR PURCHASE. Save your precious shelf space for something worth hearing. I'm adding a star just for their boldness in experimenting otherwise this is a 1 star album musically speaking.