Bangster of Goats

Without a doubt, the Rick. My own personal bass of choice for the last couple decades. ;)

Oh hell no. Lip synching would make a travesty of the show. I'd rather hear him sounding like a garbage disposal with a bad case of the flu than see him lipsynch. Heck I've never really fully accepted the various triggered background vocals, even. Bad enough to see Al lipsynching to those (unless someone leaves his mic on... ;) )

It has a lot of nostalgic appeal to me, as it was the first new Rush album to be released during the time I started college. So it always reminds me of those cold wintery nights of 1989 in my old college town. The production (as has been mentioned billions of times over the years) is indeed pretty thin and anemic, and while I rail against that because it does sound pretty balls-less, the cold sound does contribute to the "wintery" sound of the album. It does sound very clear compared to the bog of mud that would be Test For Echo a few years later, though... The only song I don't like on the album is Stupidconductor. Errrrr Superconductor. Always skip it. Sounds like it should be a battery commercial.

In the post-'90s era of the band, it's my least favorite album, but I still like a bunch of the songs on it. Bravest Face being one of them actually. To me it's akin to those somewhat oddball songs like Chemistry or Twilight Zone.

I first started liking Rush around '82 when I was 12 years old or so (but didn't get heavily into them until a couple years later) and the impression I had of them back then was this sort of futuristic "technologically advanced" band comprised of three mature, extremely serious "wise elder" musicians. Fueled by the mountains of synthesizers I saw surrounding Geddy and Neil with his short hair (which made me think "that guy is SERIOUS.. and look at all that stuff in his drum kit!"), in the ESL clips MTV would occasionally show. It looked to me like three engineers hard at work manning a huge machine and I thought it was way cool. ;) And yeah, they were getting a little more popular back then, but they were still way underground compared to the likes of Van Halen, Journey, etc.

Also, I thought Red Lenses was too weird when I first heard it, but I love that song now. It's still probably the weirdest song Rush has ever done, but I love it for that.

I think my sole criticism for that period can be summed up in two words: Second Nature. I never really cared for that song. A big pile of sappy goo. At least, that's what I feel. Now I lay me down in dream land; guys please nix it from the reel. Anyway, yeah, I like even Tai Shan better, as well as some of the other songs that seem to get a lot of hate, like High Water. One of my favorites from that album actually. The strings and choir at the end of Marathon are a little much I think, but I otherwise love that song.

And the Space Invaders get by on you...

FACE UP Oh wait what

Looks like someone crop dusted Jurassic Park with pot smoke and now all the dinos are all sitting around baked listening to Yes.

I have to add that the guitar solo break in Between the Wheels is one of my all-time favorite Rush moments. One of my favorite Alex solos and I love what Neil and Ged are doing under it.

It was my first "new" Rush album and my first tour. Loved it! Like I mentioned in the GUP thread, GUP was really my first big introduction to Rush, so the synth stuff didn't put me off at all. The opposite even. I've always been kind of a synth head... Anyway, I remember recording Big Money off the radio and playing that to death before the album came out.

Lemony cake of course... And also: Jacob's Ladder: "The clowns prepare for battle..." No One At The Bridge: "The sky is bitching, violently..." Best I Can: "Gotta eat shit to rock, I hate no small talk, I'll find a way!" Fly By Night: "My chickens are coming and I just can't pretend..."

GUP was the first Rush album I ever bought, pretty soon after its release. I had kinda-sorta started liking Rush before then, hearing Tom Sawyer, Subdivisions, and such on the radio and occasionally on MTV, but after I saw the video for Distant Early Warning I remember turning to my little brother and saying "I'm gonna get that album!" It just sounded cool to me. At this point I was also completely unfamiliar and unaware of anything Rush did before 1981. So I bought the album and listened to it, but it didn't catch on with me immediately. A couple months later though, it clicked. And from there I started collecting Rush's back catalog and I was on my way... I never hated the album. What ended up hooking me was its futuristic, dark, sci-fi sound and themes (and the sci-fi flavored videos they did for some of the songs didn't hurt either... I was a little kid in the '70s hooked on the original Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and stuff) To me, it still sounds the most "futuristic" of all of Rush's albums. Maybe if I had heard the old stuff first, I would have felt differently, but all the old stuff came later for me.

Clockwork Angels wouldn't be good as a movie... it's not a really cinematic plot; it's just a guy who does a bunch of different things and ends up reflecting on his life when he got older. No real climax. 2112 would be better, but it would need some fleshing out... and de-emphasize the whole finding the guitar thing, it just reeks too much of '70s-80s rock'n'roll fantasy schtick. ;)

I will always have a soft spot for ESL, despite its "issues". Early on in my Rush fandom, I bought that album because it was the closest thing to a "greatest hits" album available at the time (the year was 1984... weird to think now that it was only 3 years old when I bought it... but I digress!) and I wanted a sampler of Rush material beyond what I already had. Grace Under Pressure was my first Rush album, Moving Pictures was second and Signals third, and ESL made fourth. ESL really helped me discover the earlier stuff.

I think Geddy's gifted away all his old doublenecks by now. I'm pretty sure Andrew MacNaughtan (RIP) got one of them at some point. Some promo pics of Ged's home studio from the My Favorite Headache era showed a doubleneck in the background along with some other old basses including a Rick or two and the black Wal, but that was 13 years ago. I'm pretty sure most if not all of the old synths (the Oberheims, Minimoogs, PPG Waves, etc) are all long gone as well. Once they were sampled, they were shown the door, sadly. I remember the story of them digging up some Taurus pedals from the folks they donated them to, at NIck R's urging during the Snakes and Arrows days, but that's it.

Roll The Bones,,, ranks right at the bottom for me. :D The rap part... yeah Neil said they were thinking of getting John Cleese and getting him to really ham it up, but in the end they thought that it might get a little old after a few listens. They also considered actual rappers (LL Cool J was mentioned, and Chuck D could have been an interesting choice as Public Enemy was flying high around that time and Chuck's a fan if I recall correctly) but in the end they just went with pitch-shifted Geddy. Too bad about the John Cleese thing... I can see their point about the humor getting old but the rap part got old really quickly regardless. ;) There are a very few bright spots on the album for me (Dreamline is a classic), but the rest seems like uninspired filler and the whiffs of funk permeating around don't do anything for me. That funk-metal thing was in vogue around that time and I never enjoyed it, heh.

I do like most of the songs, but I don't like the production. It sounds muffled and muddy, and this album was where Ged and Al started throwing on billions of guitar and vocal (and bass!) layers in earnest, and the result is things can get a little woolly and fuzzy sounding like an angry beehive. Limbo is a skipper for me. It kind of meanders around and takes too long to go nowhere in the end. They should have hacked up Limbo and Virtuality and made one instrumental out of some of the musical pieces of both. ;) Against the grain, I love a couple of the songs that seemingly most people hate: Color of Right and Carve Away The Stone. Time and Motion is another good one to me. It almost sounds old-school Rush, if you take away the Geddy choir heh.

Blurred Lines.

Comic books have been around since... when, the '40s? '30s? Next we'll be lamenting the introduction this new-fangled device called the "television" or this gosh-darned noise called "rock'n'roll music" kids listen to these days... it's all the Devil's work I tell you!

The book would have been more tolerable if it didn't have snippets of Rush lyrics shoehorned in every other paragraph.

Alex can't sing!? Pfffft! You guys do know Rick Wakeman has recruited Big Al to be the lead singer in another new version of Yes, right?

Yeah I've noticed that on GUP... and personally and artistically, I prefer a drier sound. I don't like things to get all blurry with tons of reverb slathered on. And I'm still mentally scarred from the pingy-bright gated-reverb drum sounds of the 80s. ;)

Funny to think that Counterparts is 20 years old now, and when Counterparts was a brand new album, Moving PIctures was only 12 years old. That's almost the timespan between Vapor Trails and the Vapor Trails remix. Time and motion...