MOVING PICTURES

I'm going to keep this review brief comparatively because this album has been analyzed to death. A couple things worth noting is that RUSH here split the album into coherent halves; the first half is more reflective of a fruition of their previous songwriting approach from the solid parts of CARESS OF STEEL up to PERMANENT WAVES, featuring proggy, accessible, hard rocking songs like "Tom Sawyer,", "Red Barchetta" and "Limelight". This album has been covered to death and there's nothing more to really add to it aside from, yes, these are great, great songs and landmarks of their type.

The half that is more interesting to me is the second half. It is here that we get the first hints of the sound they intended to explore for the next four albums (from SIGNALS to HOLD YOUR FIRE), something based in prog rock but incorporating more explicit elements of New Wave, pop rock, reggae, electronic sounds and dance music. We get something like "The Camera Eye", which is one of my favorite epics of theirs as it returns to the kind of textural style of "Jacob's Ladder" from their previous album, Permanent Waves. It is understated and subtle and, I think at least, points towards what MARILLION would do once h joined the band and what PORCUPINE TREE would do for their early albums. We also get "Vital Signs", which has become my favorite song on the album. There is an insistent groove in the drums, a sincerity to the reggae influence that had been missing before and really strong, spare guitar work that shows they had been boning up on their POLICE records. We also get "Witch Hunt", which is another more atmospheric piece, focusing more on mood and timbre than on explicit rockitude. This half of the album is overlooked most often because it is the subtler, more mature twin to the bombastic, youthful verve of the first half, but I find it more exciting for the things it buries in the sound. When listening to this one, don't forget that these songs are here.

Five stars. A prog classic.