CARESS OF STEEL

Rush will always remain a favorite band of mine, they were in a sense the band that got me into progressive rock. I decided to show some love to an underrated gem in Rush's discography and one of my all time favorite progressive rock albums.

I can understand that this album is a bit hard to digest, on one side you have three shorter hard rock tracks and on the second side you have two prog epics. The opener 'Bastille Day' is one of my favorites, with some great driving riffs. 'Lakeside Park' is a lighter feel-good song, it sounds very peaceful and makes a nice balance between styles. 'I Think I'm Going Bald' may seem odd at first, but taking as the joke it was meant to be, it's pretty good.

The first epic on the album 'The Necromancer', is a continuation of the epic from the previous album, 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog'. The song features many heavy to soft transitions that would characterize much of Rush's later works. It also shows the appearance of spoken word, which would show up again two albums later on my favorite Rush song 'Cygnus X-1'. The second epic is the nearly 20-minute 'The Fountain of Lamneth', where Neil Peart shows some of his best drum work around the 5-minute mark. Again, this epic shows much of what Rush would later use in more critically acclaimed epic like '2112' or 'Xanadu'.

Overall, this is my favorite of the classic Rush albums and should not be skipped. This is the album that shaped them into the prog rock band they are known to be today.

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