GRACE UNDER PRESSURE 1984 TOUR

Grace Under Pressure is another of the earlier concert performances of Rush running for about an hour with a lot of songs from "Grace Under Pressure" of course and it is nice to hear these. It begins with a glorious opening with The Spirit Of Radio.

The Enemy Within is rarely heard live but sparked my memory and it's a great song. The Weapon is always fantastic, one of my favourites, and Witch Hunt is always welcome from "Moving Pictures" recently heard in the Time Machine concerts. Lee's vocals are excellent throughout and the guitars are incredible.

New World Man is another one rarely heard live recently and it is OK though not one of the better tracks from "Signals". Distant Early Warning follows and it is a great song from GUP, that has become a concert favourite.

Red Sector A is an awesome song and I loved hearing it live, with one of the strongest melodies of the Rush catalogue. The lyrics by Lee are terrific and when Lee sings "smoking gun" a massive explosion goes off causing the crowd to roar. The lyrics are actually based on family experience and is a homage to his mother and father that survived the holocaust. Though Lee re wrote the lyrics to have a broader perspective that it may apply to any holocaust like situation such as Rwanda.

Closer To The Heart is always a crowd pleaser and the crowd know it well enough to drown out some of Lee's vocals. The obligatory medley is here with a terrific merging of some classics, YYZ, Temples Of Syrinx, and Tom Sawyer. It is nice to hear Lee be able to reach those high notes too in the chorus.

Vital Signs is always great and it ends with another medley blending Finding My Way and In The Mood, from the earliest album.

Overall, this is a great snippet of songs from the Rush 80s years, worth checking out for certain even if for nostalgia if nothing else. As always with these concerts they are best seen then heard and I totally recommend the excellent DVD rather than this CD, as the music is identical.

Grace Under Pressure is one of the better albums from Rush's synthesiser-oriented period, which was a stylistic departure which wasn't to everyone's tastes. To date, the main official live release from this era was A Show of Hands, which naturally focused on songs new to the era rather with only Closer To the Heart pre-dating it - as a result, it didn't really reflect their actual setlists of the time.

This live document of the Grace Under Pressure tour redresses the balance by offering something a bit closer to actual concert setlists of the time (though it's a bit truncated at just over an hour long, rather than presenting a full-length show). With more guitar-heavy songs in the mix, this results in a more varied sound than the studio album, though there's still a strong focus on recent-ish songs - the only pre-Permanent Waves tune played in full is Closer To the Heart, and there's a few more fragments present as components of the two medleys which bracket Vital Signs towards the end, and that's it.

Still, the sound here is rockier than that presented on A Show of Hands - the material on that was recorded in 1986-1988, when Rush had gone even deeper into synth territory and had heavily layered their studio compositions to the point where to reproduce them onstage they had to resort to a certain amount of preprogrammed synth parts, curtailing the scope to deviate from the studio renditions of songs and lending a somewhat cold and overly-polished air to proceedings. In contrast, it's apparent here that in 1984 the band were still a bit looser and more organic onstage, which is generally helpful, and so it's quite handy for giving a broader picture of what Rush were doing live in this period.

It's not perfect; the overall sound a bit muffled to me, and the audience is overly present in the mix. At the same time, that very lack of perfection makes this the ideal counterpoint to the overly precise Show of Hands.