MOVING PICTURES

Rush's MOVING PICTURES is a brief trip but an amazing one. The band for the most part broke free of the big epic pieces with this album's prequel PERMANENT WAVES and this one, but songcraft is king on the album. Synthesizers work their way in, but not as many as on the band's other 80s albums like SIGNALS. The overall sound is one of pure musicianship and technical skill, but one that still captures the ear with catchiness. This album also spawned three hit radio singles, which is incredible, since there are only seven total songs.

1. Tom Sawyer- The band's biggest hit starts off the album. Drum god Neil Peart steps it back a notch to give Geddy Lee's bass, keyboard, and vocals the spotlight, while Lifeson plays a convincingly enough classic rock guitar, even when he isn't programmed for such a categorization. The lyric is the tale of a character who is every bit a rebel as the true Tom Sawyer, hence the title.

2. Red Barchetta- This song is quite the interesting one. The soundtrack is light, airy, Blind Guardian-inspiring, and downright poppy, but the lyrics are a surreal, government-stabbing horror story of how in the future we will be so programmed by the powers that be that the car will be outlawed, and simply driving one will be a terrible crime. There may be no monsters, ghouls, or witches, but make no mistake: this is modern-day horror. Neil proves how he can explore the human mind and discover what worries us most, and this is some of his best work this side of 2112.

3. YYZ- The band's quintessential instrumental takes its spot as a daring track three. It starts as a bit of a scale exercise aided by the precision drumming of Peart, but we see that the twisted minds behind Rush have made is something so much more. The guitarwork is insane, and the miniature bass solos throughout are enough to send Steve Harris and Geezer Butler into the fetal position. The listener soon discovers that the overall purpose of this bustling four-and-a-half minuter is Rush proving that they are the most tight-knit and technically skilled unit ever to grace our headphones, speakers, and music collections.

4. Limelight- This hit song takes its place as my favorite on the album (though it is just about impossible to truly choose just one). The intro guitar riff is Alex in full-on rock star mode, legs spread into a power stance and eyes intent on his destiny. What makes this song so cool is that all this rock starriness is abandoned come solo time, which combines elements of progressive rock, classic rock, metal, progressive metal (his forte), reggae, and jazz. This sort of uncategorizability is what truly categorizes Rush, not just Lifeson. The lyric is Neil being artsy again, suggesting that all the world is a stage and we are merely each another's audience. He also writes a classic rock staple: the tale of a band who just has it too damn good. So good, in fact, that living in the limelight becomes a burden. All these things melt together to create the greatest hit the band has recorded, and certainly this album's best song.

5. The Camera Eye- While the band may have sworn off epics, this ten minute song begs to differ. The synthesizers that would appear more throughout the first half of the 80s Rush records appear in the most abundance here of anywhere on the album. The band also reuse an element from the great big conceptual pieces of their 70s work, that being dividing a long song into parts. The song may be long, but it has purpose. It won't go down as one of their great epics, but don't write it off as bad. That would be wrong of you.

6. Witch Hunt- Alex Lifeson again displays his versatility and variety by playing some of the most doomy and sinister guitar ever to fall from a 1981 guitar, and pretty damn convincing too. This song is the first in a reverse order series called "Fear". The lyrics showcase political and humane horror as does track two, this time in a more understandable, mainstream, and less deep way: the witch hunts of Salem in the colonial times. The lyrics point out just how horrible mankind can be if he puts his mind to it. 'Tis a theme that ne'er fails, and helps us all feel a little better about ourselves, if not giving us a long hard look in the mirror.

7. Vital Signs- This was the band's "last minute" song for this album, something they had on every album, said they in Martin Popoff's CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: 30 YEARS OF RUSH AT HOME AND AWAY, a book that I would strongly recommend to absolutely any Rush fan. But as with most all of these last-minute Rush songs, it sounds anything but rushed. The lyrical artfulness of Neil is too high for even me to decode, save for the fairly universal line: "Everybody got to elevate from the norm.", one that Geddy repeats extremely well throughout the song's winding down. Keyboards reappear in nearly the abundance of The Camera Eye, but never are turned away due to Geddy's masterful and modest use of them. No one should complain about this as a closer, either. It fits where they put it.