MOVING PICTURES

The format is streamlined yet again as the band skyrockets up the rock charts with "Moving Pictures". Even so, no amount of catchiness and popularity from tracks like Tom Sawyer and Limelight can detract from the fact that 7/8 time signatures simply can't be viewed as anything less than progressive in the rock context. We are prog-nuts, so we sometimes forget how radically different these drum fills and odd beats are in mainstream popular rock music. The fact that Rush could make this challenging music so popular attests to their ever-increasing ability to make the progrock form potent, urgent and short (as well as imaginative and virtuosic). Peart's pithy lyrics also deserve credit for providing perfect touches of vicarious thrill in Limelight and exultant tone in Tom Sawyer.

Witch Hunt is Peart's first excursion into using the studio as an instrument. This is the first song in which he plays percussion parts that would be impossible for him to recreate by himself in concert.

More thrills are to be had as the band takes us on an illegal car ride (Red Barchetta), and an exciting instrumental fly-by (YYZ), "YYZ" enjoys rock radio airplay even to this day. Surely Rush could "do no wrong" at this moment in time!

The seeds of Lifeson's shift in approach to the guitar can be heard on the album's closing track "Vital Signs". The emphasis is on rhythms and textures, timbres and tone. Overall, the song points toward a rock-reggae dimension not entirely unlike The Police's "Ghost in the Machine", one which the band would explore much further on their next studio album.