StellarJetman

Duh. Music is his favorite headache.

Eh. I never liked it too much; it's obvious that they had a lot of ambition making it, but it just meanders around and never really gets very cohesive for me. I always thought that it sounded unfinished.

QUOTE (Tommy Sawyer @ Oct 7 2011, 08:34 PM) Signals, meh. Yes, exactly. Easily my least-favorite of the synthesizer albums, and pretty low on my list overall.

QUOTE (Majestyk @ Oct 5 2011, 08:22 AM) QUOTE Signals - Sounds so dead and lifeless to me, and painfully 80s. Sad to hear someone say that, regarding my favorite Rush album. The MFSL version sounds incredible. Really? It always sounded horribly muffled and muted to me; does the remaster really change that?

Moving Pictures is probably their definitive album, Hemispheres represents the peak of their nerdy progressive rock style (and it has "The Trees" on it, for good measure), and Presto is my favorite out of the more restrained middle phase of their career. They're my three "core" Rush albums, and I'd definitely recommend starting with them.

Musical content aside, which album's sound do you like the most? I'd have to go with Hemispheres, mainly because it sounds like a cross between A Farewell to Kings and Moving Pictures, and I love the way that those albums sound.

It's a dull song on a dull album. No, sir, I don't like it.

Eh. "Hemispheres" is good, but it always seems like a missed opportunity to me, even incomplete. The "heart versus mind" moral is trite and unmemorable next to Peart's then-usual Objectivist bent, and the didactic execution undermines the song's own message. If the music complemented the lyrics at all, I'd be inclined to forgive that, if only because the lyrics would have provided the song with an interesting, entertaining conceit. Using the same arrangement for both the Apollo and Dionysus sections really works against the contrast that the lyrics so desperately strive to create, though, and the song really suffers for it. If Peart had put a more interesting and distinctive spin on the message, and if the tone of the music reflected the tone of the lyrics themselves, I'd probably be in love with the song, but I just can't bring myself to like it all that much when neither is actually the case. "2112", on the other hand, is a blast. I don't care that it sounds thin or that it has a goofy plot; I can't think of another song of comparable length that's so fun for me to listen to. It doesn't feel like twenty minutes at all, which is far more than I can say for "Hemispheres".

QUOTE (-Ender- @ Sep 15 2011, 08:57 AM) Can't take thread seriously when OP's avatar is flashing .gif of Dog Years. I have that avatar because I hate "Dog Years".

QUOTE (sco703 @ Sep 12 2011, 02:06 PM) And that is a pretty cool experience. I always wonder if that line is talking about roadkill? It's talking about people who are "crushed" by the "wheels of progress". No, really. Also, I was listening to the radio once and "The Spirit of Radio" came on. Quite an experience, let me tell you.

I was going to lay out a whole CD's worth of music (80 minutes), but I got hopelessly mired on the "fringe" of what I was cutting to condense nine albums and two singles down to that, so I'm going to do ten and leave it at that. Ordered chronologically. I tried to work out a real order that I'd want to hear, but I just ended up shuffling around everything that wasn't "Dreamline" near the end of the list. "Afterimage" "Middletown Dreams" "Mystic Rhythms" "The Pass" "Available Light" "Dreamline" "Leave That Thing Alone" "Cold Fire" "Freeze" "The Main Monkey Business"

I was in my house.

There's a fine line between love and illusion, A fine place to penetrate The gap between actor and act, The lens between wishes and fact.

QUOTE (senor_velasco @ Sep 9 2011, 02:10 PM) so there is no digital distortion on the master tracks then? i remember hearing about that. the retrospective remixes sound better but by far perfect. you have to always keep in mind that the best mix in the world can be butchered by a bad mastering job which is - according to my knowledge - where the main problem was in the first place. but i'd appreciate any further insight on what exactly happened with vt. The master recordings are fine; the mixing and final mastering killed it because Geddy ended up having to do the whole thing himself, despite his inexperience. Here's what Alex said: QUOTE (Alex Lifeson @ May 7 2002)The poor guy was doing this on his own. It really shook him up... He said, "I don't know what to think. I think it's awful."

I have a habit of listening to "Red Tide" just for the rainsticks in the bridge.

Because so many people here don't seem to get it, this is what's so awful about the album that it warrants a complete remix from the ground up. Here are the volume levels for the right stereo channel in "Limelight". Notice how there's plenty of room for the sound, how the space lets it take shape in a pleasing way. Now, have a look at the levels for "Earthshine". Everything is pushed to the absolute maximum volume, squashing and distorting everything into a noisy mess. This has nothing to do with Vapor Trails having a "raw" type of "style". Take "Stick It Out", for comparison. Is it loud? Yes. Is it raw? Yes. The difference is that Peter Collins knew what he was doing and didn't artificially pump the volume up and ruin the sound - those volume levels are high, yes, but there's still room for the sound to sound good. Vapor Trails, on the other hand, is "brickwalled" to the point that it's practically unlistenable for a lot of people. This doesn't make it sound good. This takes what could have been a great, hard-edged rock album and leaves it ragged and scrappy-sounding. Interestingly, Vapor Trails is this way entirely by accident. I say "interestingly" because this was actually a (terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad) trend at the time (cf. Polara's Jetpack Blues, released in the same year, which contains this miracle of audio engineering), believe it or not. Thankfully, this kind of production has long hence fallen out of favor.

I just deleted "Second Nature" and "Tai Shan" from Hold Your Fire and moved "High Water" to the fourth spot, and I was completely blown away by how much more I appreciated the album. It still isn't one of my favorites - no amount of track-shuffling will get rid of that overwrought production - but I actually enjoy listening to it as an album, now, and it works far better for me than the original version ever did. I know that moving "Turn the Page" to the end of Hold Your Fire is nothing new around here, but I was curious to see if anybody else had had similar successes with other albums.

Presto for me, no contest. Moving Pictures is no slouch either, though.

I'm a Missouri native, so this is especially heartwarming for me.

I'd get "Leave That Thing Alone" into a movie soundtrack. It'd probably end up playing over a montage or something. In the event that the movie is terrible, I'd retroactively decide, instead, to give "The Trees" an awesome animated video, as it was, itself, inspired by a cartoon, and because the instrumental section in the middle would lend itself handily to Fantasia-style shenanigans.

So, the current issue of Costco's little magazine has a somewhat Rush-focused classic rock feature. There are interviews with Geddy Lee, Roger Daltrey, John Lodge, and Justin Hayward, along with a drawing for a Fender Geddy Lee bass and a signed Moving Pictures lithograph. Figured that it was thread-worthy.

QUOTE (Silas Lang @ Jul 24 2011, 12:54 PM) I think 90125, Tormato, Topographic and the first two are all better Please tell me that I misread that.

Invisible Touch.