MOVING PICTURES

This is in many ways the quintessential Rush album. It utilizes each member's skills without limiting any one of them, and the music, while being consistently complex and challenging, is very streamlined and polished. It seems that here they manage to really transcend their individual parts, playing in their own styles but really playing together as a unit and in a more concise and more traditional song-based format. All of the elements of this album were present in Permanent Waves, a prog rock meets new wave kind of quirky hard rock, but what the band has done here is matured a little and formed a cohesive whole out of all their elements to form a more refined sound that was truly their own. Neil Peart was quoted as saying that, given his druthers, he would make Moving Pictures Rush's first album. I think that would be terrible, because almost all of the music that preceeded it was friggin awesome, like Hemispheres, A Farewell to Kings, Permanent Waves, and 2112. But all previous albums, while providing so many awesome moments, were just growing room that the band needed before becoming completely realized, and Moving Pictures sounds truly like the complete realization of a vision. They outdid themselves on this one. And if nothing else, you got to give this band props for finding their way (pardon the pun) and adapting their prog sensibilities to a more concise and polished format without losing much of what made them good, and writing better SONGS in the process (as their goal was to shorten songs and put more emphasis on the songwriting part). This was Rush realized, after seven years growth. After this album of mastery, they continued to evolve, drawing upon many, many different influences, and creating many, many good songs over the years, songs that weren't prog but continued to challenge and showcase each member's abilities, and at the same time worked as melodic, good songs. That, in my book, is just as good as anything that what some might call "true" progressive rock ever created.