A SHOW OF HANDS

As had become traditional for Rush by this point, after four studio albums they brought out this live piece to summarise this particular era of their career ranging from Signals to Hold Your Fire. This is an era which started out strong but started to flag towards the end, with Hold Your Fire finding the approach wearing thin, but fortunately the live versions of the material from that album (and the somewhat better-liked but still contentious Power Windows) show a bit more flair and style than their studio renditions.

Unfortunately, compared to their two preceding live albums Rush had less scope for throwing out any curve balls. With only three musicians onstage, and a lot of the songs in question requiring more simultaneous synth and guitar Alex Lifeson could handle all at once (the man only has the two arms, after all!), on these tours the synth parts had to be largely preprogammed, more or less killing any scope they had to introduce any variation into the songs.

As a result, the album ends up being a little lifeless, an exercise in playing the songs from the albums more or less how you remember them from the studio editions; at some points only a bit of crowd noise mixed in here and there gives the impression that the band are live at all . Perhaps hiring a guest musician or two to provide backup on the synths might have made for a more organic experience, but then again the trio's chemistry has always been so tight that incorporating more musicians into it would be a dangerous proposition indeed.

Alternately, if the album had included more 80s performances of less synth-dominated parts of their back catalogue it might have gone better - it closes with a reasonable rendition of Closer to the Heart, and the difference between that track the program-locked material before it is striking. But then again, All the World's a Stage and Exit Stage Left had already covered all the best songs from prior eras, and there seems to have been an effort made to avoid duplicating songs presented on those two; I can certainly see the logic behind that, and to some that might make A Show of Hands better value, but at the same time I think it does risk steering into the constraints the band were under.

In short, by this stage of their career Rush had written themselves into a corner with their live albums, in that everyone was expecting this release to focus on the tracks from Signals to Grace but the fact was that the songs in question just didn't lend themselves well to live performances. The album's saved by the fact that for the most part they give solid, energetic renditions of the material, and it's impressive just how much they can nail the non-synth parts live, but it's best to come this if you want a quick "best of synth-era Rush" rundown, not because you want a live album which actually sounds live.