Digital Refrain

Illustration by Maddison Bond.

In advance of the June 12th release of Rush’s 20th studio album, Clockwork Angels, Sean Highkin is taking a decidedly unfair and imbalanced look back at the career of his favorite band. Here are Part I, Part II, and Part III  if you missed them.

In the previous installment of “Wheels Within Wheels,” I pointed to Rush’s adeptness at bending rock trends to fit their sound as the chief reason why their 1980s output worked so well. Following 1987’s Hold Your Fire, the synth-layered New Wave sound they cultivated for much of that decade fell out of favor, which was probably beneficial for Rush. While that album was solid, they had begun to back themselves into a corner with keyboard-dominated compositions, and for the first time in their career lost sight of their power-trio roots. These roots would return with a vengeance on 1993’s Counterparts, but the two albums they released prior, 1989’s Presto and 1991’s Roll the Bones, occupy the wide-open time period between the death of the ‘80s bombast they embraced and the dawn of the grunge movement that would reinvigorate them. Keeping up with musical trends is difficult when there aren’t many overt ones to speak of.

What they did with Presto was make an album very similar in spirit to Hold Your Fire, but with most of the keys chopped out. What little keyboard work remained tended towards electric piano. The band brought on producer Rupert Hine, best known at that point for his work with the Fixx and the Thompson Twins, and the result was the most lightweight, jazzy album they’ve ever made. It’s the only record in the Rush canon that could ever be called “forgotten,” since the band members themselves periodically downplay its very existence. “It didn’t live up to its own potential even, never mind our potential,” Neil Peart told journalist Martin Popoff in 2004. “They’re not songs that I would look back and say, ‘this is our best work,’” Geddy Lee added.

Naturally, I beg to differ. Despite the group’s own dismissal of Presto, and its status as the least musicianly album they’ve ever recorded, it’s a record that features some of their strongest pure songwriting. “The Pass” is one of Peart’s strongest lyrical achievements, possibly even at the very top of the heap, an unflinchingly honest attempt to tackle teen suicide backed by an appropriately soaring Alex Lifeson solo. Elsewhere, “Chain Lightning,” “Red Tide,” and the title track feature particularly strong vocal melodies. “Superconductor” is notable for being the only song in history to feature the line “A strong and simple beat that you can dance to” while boasting a main riff in 7/4 time.

It’s easy to see why the band and many fans view Roll the Bones as a superior evolution of Presto’s aesthetic. It’s a more complete, cohesive album, with a few of the band’s all-time best songs (“Bravado,” “Ghost of a Chance”). But while it achieves a greater conceptual unity than its predecessor, it also goes completely overboard on the slickness. Tracks like “The Big Wheel” and “Face Up” border on Adult Contemporary, a copy of a copy of the Joshua Tree-era U2 sound they only truly reach on “Bravado.”

And then we get to the only thing in their discography whose mere existence I’ve ever found myself apologizing for: Roll the Bones’ title track, with its cloying rap section that sounded dated and hopelessly out of touch in 1991 and hasn’t been done any favors by the passage of two full decades. For some reason, Rush kept it in their setlists until 2004, with a video of a skeleton taking on the rap and creating the greatest piece of unintentional comedy they’ve ever perpetrated (the other contenders: the “Time Stand Still” video I included in the previous post, and the baffling medley of “Xanadu” and “Superconductor” they performed on the Roll the Bones tour). Reportedly, Rush’s original plan for the “Roll the Bones” rap involved a guest appearance from LL Cool J, who still had a modicum of relevance at that point and was understandably less than enthused about the prospect of rapping lines like “Stop throwing stones/the night has a thousand saxophones/so get out there and rock, and roll the bones!”

The grungy Counterparts played much more to Rush’s strengths. It was the first time since Grace Under Pressure that a Rush album truly rocked. The intricate musical interplay that dominated the last stretch of records to which the phrase “power trio” could be applied was replaced by power chords—lots of power chords. Lifeson sounds truly in his element for the first time in years, audibly salivating at the opportunity to cut loose again after a decade buried behind a wall of synthesizers. But on Counterparts, his attack is more stripped-down. The menacing “Stick it Out” and “Between Sun and Moon” display some weapons-grade riffage, while album opener “Animate” and “Leave That Thing Alone” (a sleeper candidate for the title of best Rush instrumental) introduce to the Rush palette the concept of a groove.

But while Counterparts is, musically speaking, arguably the strongest of Rush’s post-1980s albums, there’s one massive caveat. It marked the first time Peart’s lyrics delved into personal territory and explored romantic relationships, and suffice it to say that he did not take to it well. The would-be tolerance anthem “Nobody’s Hero” actually features the line “I knew he was different in his sexuality/I went to his parties as a straight minority,” and “Speed of Love” and “Alien Shore” are equally cringeworthy. Only on “Cold Fire,” a he-said/she-said number with a killer hook, does he get the balance right. It’s a shame, too, because Counterparts wastes one of Lee’s better front-to-end vocal performances on easily the worst set of songs Peart has ever written.

Although Counterparts reinvigorated the band musically, Peart himself was compelled to take this self-rediscovery even further. After being referred by former Journey drummer Steve Smith at a Buddy Rich tribute event, Peart began studying with legendary drum teacher Freddie Gruber, who radically reinvented his entire approach. The Peart whose playing is heard on 1996’s Test for Echo is a much more precise drummer, obsessed with white space rather than filling up the sheet with fills, and the new philosophy resulted in the most compelling work in many years from the man who spawned several generations of hyperactive drummers.

Unfortunately, Test for Echo also represents Rush’s unrivaled songwriting nadir. It’s their only work that can legitimately be termed boring. “The Color of Right,” “Half the World,” and “Carve Away the Stone” betray their existence in yet another time of uncertainty in the rock landscape, the immediate post-grunge/pre-garage-rock-revival years. There’s nothing remarkable about most of these songs—I’ve listened to this album an ungodly number of times, and only the stellar “Driven” and the totally out-of-character ballad “Resist” leave much of an impression.

For years, it seemed as though this was how Rush would go out. Shortly after the completion of the Test for Echo tour, Peart’s 19-year-old daughter, Selena, was tragically killed in a car accident, and his wife, Jackie, died of cancer less than a year later. Understandably, Rush effectively ceased to exist at that point, and Peart hit the road on a motorcycle journey that eventually took him to South America. This soul-searching trek is chronicled beautifully in Peart’s profoundly affecting 2002 memoir, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, the best of five such books he’s released (all of which are well worth reading for fans and non-fans alike). Even among Rush’s hardcore fans, Peart has always been somewhat of an enigma, never seeming as eager to do ritualistic media work as his bandmates. He’s garnered a reputation as a curmudgeon and a recluse, much of which seems undeserved. The amount of personal detail he presents in his books and in periodic blog entries on his official site is anything but closed-off—he just prefers to do it on his terms. It’s understandable that he would have wanted to escape everything related to his former life when his entire family was taken away from him, but it would have been a shame if this band had never released music again.

NEXT: Peart returns from his sabbatical to record Rush’s intensely personal Vapor Trails album, which kicks off an unlikely career renaissance that includes, for the first time in their career, some form of mainstream acceptance.

Illustration by Maddison Bond.

In advance of the June 12th release of Rush’s 20th studio album, Clockwork Angels, Sean Highkin is taking a decidedly unfair and imbalanced look back at the career of his favorite band. Here’s Part I if you missed it.

If Rush weren’t the antithesis of conventional rock cool, 2112 would be treated as one of the all-time great punk-rock career moves. 1975’s Caress of Steel tanked, and Mercury threatened to drop the band unless they started writing more commercial material. Neil Peart responded by writing another side-long suite, this one about an authoritarian future world in which music was banned. It was a fairly unsubtle jab, both thematically and sonically, at the label—and it ended up striking a chord with the public in a way that no previous Rush album had. More importantly, its success earned the trio a lifetime pass from any future label interference. Never before or since has such a blatant defying of record-company authority worked out so well—it’s just never likely to get the credit, because of Rush’s lack of critical correctness.

It wasn’t without reason that 2112 hit a nerve while Caress stiffed. The latter record’s extended pieces, “The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth,” often felt like collections of shorter songs slapped together under one title without much rhyme or reason. 2112’s 20-minute title track, on the other hand, completely and utterly justifies its length. The playing is focused and unified. Geddy Lee finally found a niche for his high-pitched wail that didn’t blatantly rip off Robert Plant. The “Overture” and “Temples of Syrinx” sections of the suite are the modern-day live staples, but the moment when everything truly coalesced for Rush was the transition from “Discovery” to “Presentation.” The idea of Alex Lifeson building a movement literally around the tuning of a guitar would be a nightmare scenario on Fly by Night or Caress of Steel, but he does it here with authority. His interplay with Lee and the buildup to “Presentation” serve as a plot device, but they may as well represent the band’s own simultaneous discovery of identity.

2112’s narrative is iconic as rock opera, but it also brought on a burden of guilt-by-association that Rush have never quite been able to escape. Ayn Rand was explicitly credited in the album’s liner notes as providing inspiration for the epic suite, something lazy rock writers never fail to bring up dismissively even to this day. The trio were decried as fascists (especially hilarious given that Lee is the son of Holocaust survivors), and have unwittingly served as libertarian icons for the last three-plus decades. The continued association is defensible only under the one circumstance Peart will admit to today: that the group found Rand’s brand of individualism applicable to their own struggle with their label’s demands. Their decision to risk going down in flames rather than writing another Rush-sounding album is one that Rand would likely applaud, but that’s more or less the extent of their affiliation with her politics.

2112 endures as perhaps the landmark Rush album not only because of the middle finger it gave to the record industry, but also because it displays Rush’s mastery of the concept suite, an art so many (including Rush themselves) have failed to do credibly. 2112 was the second Rush album I got as a preteen, which happened to be during the one summer I convinced myself I had any kind of talent for screenwriting. I spent several months attempting to adapt 2112 into a screenplay, which proved problematic because I didn’t realize that the songs on the album’s second side were completely unrelated to the epic title track. How was a 12-year-old to know that “A Passage to Bangkok” was actually just about traveling through the Middle East sampling different varieties of weed? Or that “The Twilight Zone” was simply an homage to the TV show? With the exception of the clunky “Lessons” (mercifully the only time Lifeson has attempted to write lyrics for Rush), side two is pretty great, and far more commercial that people give it credit for. The album can be looked to today as a starting point for the fully-formed version of Rush. There would be no more playing spot-the-influence with Zeppelin, Sabbath, or Yes on their record. From this point forward, the only band they sound like is Rush.

The prog-rock version of Rush hit its apex over the next two years, with 1977’s A Farewell to Kings and 1978’s Hemispheres. The lyrical themes were as lofty as ever (Greek mythology, union politics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, space travel), but musically, they were expanding faster than they could keep up with. Hemispheres’ nine-minute instrumental “La Villa Strangiato” is the only argument anyone needs for the trio’s technical supremacy. It’s a literal clinic of harmonics and intricate, interconnected soloing that fully earns its subtitle “An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.” “La Villa” is, in a nutshell, why Rush are so polarizing. It’s hard for kids wired a certain way like me and, once upon a time, Kirk Hammett, not to be blown away. But those inclined to believe that instrumental flash is antithetical to musical soul or personality have a ready-made talking point.

Elsewhere on Kings and Hemispheres, Rush further honed and perfected every aspect of their identity. “The Trees” and “Closer to the Heart” got actual radio airplay and were unprecedented in the Rush canon for their genuine tunefulness, even if the former feels trite and forced today. Kings’ “Cygnus X-1” and Hemispheres’ 18-minute title track are the group’s crowning narrative achievements, both in storytelling and musical cohesion. “Xanadu” is a strong contender for best Rush song of all time, an 11-minute fever dream with a riff that spawned Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and Peart’s best drumming ever. The version found on 1981’s Exit…Stage Left is my favorite 13 minutes in the history of recorded sound, mostly because I have a thing for double-neck basses.

As awe-inspiring as Kings and Hemispheres were at their best, however, it was becoming clear that Rush were not long for prog rock in the conventional sense. They were beginning to find extended concept suites limiting, and the few that still prevailed on 1980’s Permanent Waves and 1981’s Moving Pictures were considerably shorter and more melodic. Of these, “Natural Science” is some of the band’s very finest work, and “The Camera Eye” foreshadowed their coming foray into keyboards.

Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures aren’t my favorite Rush albums, but I’d be hard-pressed not to call them their best. There has never been a more effective, filler-free synthesis of everything Rush does well than what can be found on these two albums. “Tom Sawyer” is Rush’s “Stairway to Heaven”—you can call it overrated because it’s the song you’re most likely to hear on a classic-rock station, but it’s really not. It’s the closest thing young drummers have to “Smoke on the Water,” something of a rite of passage. I never quite mastered it in high school. It’s a relentless, pulsating thing with a menacing earworm of a synth riff and a masterful repurposing of Mark Twain’s titular character into something not too different from 2112’s protagonist.

The rest of these two albums are largely responsible for what classic-rock relevance Rush does have. Waves’ “The Spirit of Radio” and “Freewill” tested the limits of the mainstream’s willingness to embrace odd time signatures. “YYZ” is their defining instrumental, “Limelight” is Lifeson’s pinnacle as a riff writer, and “Red Barchetta” is as strong a lyric as Peart’s ever penned. There’s a reason Rush performed Moving Pictures in its entirety on 2010’s Time Machine tour—it’s the one album that even the band’s detractors cannot deny, and the cap to one of the most quietly brilliant stretches of albums a rock band has ever hammered out.

NEXT: Rush greets the 1980s with open arms, embracing New Wave and synthesizers.