The Rush appreciation thread

Vapor Trails knocked me for a loop when I first heard it. "One Little Victory"...holy cow! The boys were back with a literal vengeance. When I got ahold of my old friend, the one who helped get me into Rush, even he remarked that the music caught him off-guard!

Catcher10 wrote: The mastering is of course brick walled to death with little dynamics, but to me it always just fit the musical style so I never complained too much.

The mastering has caught hell over the years, but honestly, it never bothered me. In fact, while there's more clarity with the remix, I think the original has more punch...more balls.

Catcher10 wrote: Then the remixed version came out and I heard the album in a different way...

My favorite song, "Freeze," sounds almost like an alternate take. I like both.

Catcher10 wrote: Secret Touch is a killer tune that just never stops.

The whole album slays! "Earthshine" is probably my second favorite song.

Oh yea...I subscribe to Rick's channel. I remember that video, Alex's song is from Counterparts IIRC....

No, I agree 100%. My point is it shows the polar opposites of Neil and Alex when it came to being in the public eye. Alex had no issues doing what he did.

You can easily follow along with Alex......

I find HYF to be quite proggy. That chorus intro to force ten? Come on! 

Right. I remember an interview in Musician when Presto came out. The article was even called (liberally paraphrasing here) "Rush: The Band That Made Rock Safe for 7/4." (The song in question was "Superconductor.")

And let's not forget that bass solo on "Show Don't Tell." That song/video aired on both FM and MTV during a time when there was a noticeably anti-prog sentiment felt throughout the scene in general...

CP and T4E don't really get much more prog than that as the band look to really reconnect with their hard rock roots, and maybe take some inspiration from the heavy rock revival going on with grunge and the alternative revolution.  CP does have Double Agent though, which if you care more about the prog of the 70s than the more literal concept of progressive music, it's the most prog they've sounded in years. But most of the record sits just a little closer to The Speed Of Love than Xanadu, to put it lightly. Anyway after the hiatus things get increasingly prog again in my opinion. 

What VT lacks in multi-part suites it makes up for in sounding wholly unlike anything else Rush have ever done, and frankly not much like anything anyone else has ever done either. It's not really prog yet, but the songs take long enough in many places that they seem to at least be thinking about how to stretch out again.  Snakes sees them more fully rekindle that old prog style with both overt references to past prog of theirs (the Hemisphere's chord in Far Cry being the main example) and new excursions into more extended length composition (The Way The Wind Blows, Armor And Sword, and The Main Monkey Business all break the 6 minute mark). Not to mention it's got three separate instrumental tracks ranging from a lovely solo acoustic guitar piece to a funky bass showcase in the vein of YYZ.  

But the real full return to Rush's progressive roots and glory has to be Clockwork Angels.  Incredibly, it's their first full concept album, with an accompanying novel (one which I quite enjoyed in high school even if I can't say it's a masterpiece of fiction or anything).  It's also the first Rush album since Moving Pictures to feature even a single song over 7 minutes long, and it has 3 of them.  Now, there aren't any 10 to 20 minute prog epics here, but the three 7ish minute cuts don't waste a single second of runtime, something that I can't really say about all of the various 6ish minute cuts from their last few albums.  The album takes you on a musical journey and it feels like a truly cohesive experience, something the band hadn't fully achieved in years, if not decades. So to answer your question, I'd say CA was the last full blown progressive rock album Rush ever did, but before that it would've been HYF or maybe PoW.