sitboaf

QUOTE Yeah, I could never get into that pink It's actually not pink - it's magenta. I've heard that the printing on the first album was a mistake. Here's what I think happened: I bet the band wanted their logo to be bright red. And, in 4-color printing, you need 2 of the 4 colors to get that color: magenta and yellow, both at 100%. Either one of the pressman, listening to Mountain and a little bit , forgot to add ink to the yellow roller, or some cheapskate at the record company decided this screeching band's first album cover only deserved 2 colors - magenta and black. The third color, yellow, would cost too much. Cyan was right out. And so what would have been a logo in a bold, Hold-Your-Fire Red, came out as magenta.

QUOTE Hold Your Fire Yeah, the '80s were so red and black, weren't they? Maybe Rush was going for "iconic." Perhaps a Dark-Side-Of-The-Moon simplicity. But you're right. It's just kinda boring.

Grace Under Pressure edged out Permanent Waves for best album cover, in what quickly became a two-horse race. But, what is the worst Rush album cover? The original album cover is cheesy, but it's SO so cheesy that it makes me love it more. My vote goes to Hemispheres. It looks like a grade school project to me.

Your emotional rankings, like mine, were pretty darn close to those generated by the Johnny Blaze System. Only 2 of your albums moved more than 3 spots. Your love of Cut To The Chase highlights one of the problems with using song rankings to determine album strength. Any songs that we really love or really hate will create a disproportionate influence on our opinion of the album as a whole. What The Johnny Blaze System does best is measure consistency.

Different Stages contained the sidelong epic 2112. On R30, we got Xanadu and Natural Science. We were just treated to Moving Pictures in its entirety on the Time Machine Tour. I think the only epics left are Lamneth, Cygnus X-1 and Hemispheres. Since the boys won't be doing this forever, is there any chance we hear one of those on the CA Tour? And in 2014, once they're freed of playing most of Clockwork Angels live, maybe we'll hear the last true classic album, Signals, in it's entirety?

I agree with Cyclonus. RiR is probably the only Rush album I'll never buy, though I did purchase 4 of its songs for inclusion on my ginormous 13-hour playlist. And each time one of those songs comes on, I cringe. The performances seem great, but I find the sound quality quite annoying. I can't get past the production, and I'm not against live albums or even live albums recorded in front of a lively Brazilian crowd immediately after a comeback - Iron Maiden's "Rock in Rio" is fantastic.

QUOTE - I didn't want to dissect the concepts/epics simply because more complicated is NOT the way I wanted to go. - Your 2 ranking doesn't make sense to me. 2 out of 5 is NOT "good" in my opinion. A 2 when it comes to ranking other things like films or hotels is GENERALLY "fair" or "okay". It's 40%. I don't see how 40%=good. Thanks for the thoughtful response, Johnny. As for dissecting the epics, it didn't take me any extra time, as I had already imported them that way- -as separate tracks. Had I not done that, I would have come up with a different way to give extra weight to the side-long songs. But, since Rush had chosen to distinguish the parts of Lamneth and 2112, I did too. As for my ranking system... It kinda bugs me when I read a song-by-song review where a person gives every other song a 5/5. Really? If you're giving the "Armor and Swords" of the world a perfect rank, how do you justify the same 5/5 for Subdivisions? So I understand how a rating of 2 looks harsh, but I realized that my brain created 2 distinctions worse than "good" (fair and poor, or 1 and 0 - don't forget zero!), and 2 distinctions better than "good" (excellent and fantastic, or 3 and 4). By that logic, a "2" is the 3rd-lowest rank and could be considered 60%. The extra 5th star is bestowed by the cosmos, for songs that become cultural icons/definers of the genre (Tom Sawyer, Working Man, Spirit of Radio).

QUOTE Otherwise, for example, Tears and the Twilight Zone have twice as much weight as 2112. Yeah that's the problem I have with all these ranking threads , Hemispheres for example only has 4 songs and some others have 13. I think I solved it. 2112 (the song) is seven songs for me. X1: book 2-Hemispheres is 6 more. Well, 5 and a half songs, because I half-weighted part 6 for being under 2 minutes. Xanadu, Camera Eye, Natural Science, Strangiato received 1.5 weights for being over 9 minutes. It seemed to work, as my "math ranking" came very close to my "emotional ranking".

Sorry to dig up such and old post (from page 3!), but I REALLY wanted to do these rankings when I got some time. Actually, iTunes made it easy, since I have all my Rush songs already rated. In order to use my existing database, I had to make some changes to the Johnny Blaze System. I think the results should come out about the same, though. My alterations: 1. I use a 5-point scale for each song, but where 5 = Immortal (only 7 songs achieved this), 4 is fantastic, 3 is excellent/very good, 2 is good, and 1 is fair to poor. I have also assigned half-star rankings (Yes, you CAN do this in iTunes). 2. The multi-part epics are broken into individual songs, as that's how I imported them originally, and it's how I think of them. The band provided us with the names of the individual parts for a reason, right? 3. Songs under 2 minutes in length get half-weighted. Songs over 9 minutes get a weight-and-a-half. It's not perfect, but it keeps BU2B2 from weighing the same as side one of 2112 or Xanadu. The Results: 1- 3.73 Moving Pictures 2- 3.31 Permanent Waves (tie) 2- 3.31 Signals (tie) 4- 3.29 Farewell to Kings 5- 2.96 Clockwork Angels 6- 2.94 Fly By Night 7- 2.90 Hold Your Fire 8- 2.88 Rush 9- 2.83 Hemispheres 10- 2.82 Counterparts (tie) 10- 2.82 Presto (tie) 10- 2.82 2112 (tie) 13- 2.81 Power Windows (tie) 13- 2.81 Snakes & Arrows (tie) 15- 2.75 Roll the Bones (tie) 15- 2.75 Grace Under Pressure (tie) 17- 2.73 Vapor Trails 18- 2.48 Caress of Steel 19- 2.14 Test for Echo Wow. Moving Pictures just torched the field. After that, there are some very close rankings, especially #9 through #17. It's not surprising, really, since there are very few songs to which I gave 5 stars (7 total) or 1 star (5 of those). There are a huge number of 2.5 to 3.5 star songs (122 out of 185). Having said that, though, I don't think my "emotional rankings" would be much different. CoS would do better, because I usually overlook "Bald" and heap love on most of Lamneth. The first two albums would rank lower, because I'm not in the mood to hear that period as much as the later periods. But, yay for Clockwork Angels at number 5!

Thanks! That was a great read. The author had trouble early in the article trying to get his arms around Rush's musical history, but when he begins focusing on touring, recording and the current state of the band, the article gets a lot more interesting.

I'm so stoked that ManchVegas will be the center of the Rush universe for a couple days. I'll try to get a review posted as soon as I walk (yes, WALK) home from the show. I'm not concerned about going into the show "deaf". I'm just worried that my wife won't hear enough familiar songs and make me stop constantly listening in the car!

If it comes down to a choice between hearing a live rendition of, let's say "Losing It" with strings versus not hearing it at all, I say "bring on the violins!" I don't hear anybody complaining about recent encores that include a polka- or reggae-version of Working Man, and if THAT song isn't sacred, nothing is. Looking forward to a live album in 2013 that doesn't sound exactly like R30 and Snakes & Arrows Live.

I had to vote for Different Stages (discs #1 and 2). There's just so much good stuff on there. I'm almost surprised every time I listen because I've forgotten some of the selections. ATWAS, ESL and aSOH are all concise and enjoyable collections, too. I was surprised there was any love for Different Stages disc 3. Here's why... Geddy sings so many of his lines behind the beat. WAY behind the beat. It's super annoying. He has to rush to squeeze all the words in. Maybe it was a phase he was going through at the time, because I don't hear it on ATWAS or ESL much, if at all. I'm just glad he stopped doing it.

http://www.knickknackrecords.com/store/images/P/Rush%20Grace%20Under%20Pressure.jpg So, lots of love for GUP. Cool. I've always wondered about a few aspects of the image. The water drop at bottom center looks like a guitar. I assume this was intentional. I see teeth and an eye. Nothing in the swirling water seems to be a hidden image, though. But the sinking chunk of metal near image center - it always appeared (to me) to resemble a map of the northeastern USA. From Wisconsin to Maine. Bisected by lake Michigan. Anyone else think that?

I knew the classic stuff from 70s and early 80s radio, then heard a little more in the late 80s via my college roommate, who owned Fly By Night and GUP. I was not a huge fan of either album. I bought PoW and loved most of it. Another friend got me into RTB. Then I bought CP. More love. And that was as far as I got for a long, long time. Then about 4 years ago, I bought Hemispheres from iTunes because it was on sale. And then CoS and 2112, FtK, and MP in rapid succession. And just at that time, I took my wife to see I Love You Man in the theater because she has a big crush on Paul Rudd. Yay! Rush in a movie! Since I'm a huge prog-head (Yes, Genesis, Floyd and the Moody Blues are all in my top 10), I took to the Kimono-era Rush immediately. So I have equal love for ProgRush, ClassicRush, SynthRush and Farewell-To-Synths-Rush. But, I like ZepRush and New Millenium Rush, too. Just not Test for Echo

Your poll groupings match exactly how I see their musical history. I first became aware of Rush during Classic and early Synth, and though I am a giant prog-head, I don't love Rush's Prog period more than the Synth period. (Because I had to go and discover the old Prog stuff, it has no nostalgic value for me.) I feel the Classic period had the best of both worlds.

Clockwork Angels deserves a lot of the praise that it's receiving, but I'm guessing the cover doesn't rank so well... or does it? Though I love the energy of the Vapor Trails cover, it doesn't look very Rush-like. Permanent Waves is just so cool and perfectly fit the new direction the band was taking.

QUOTE It's a concept album. I consider it to be a 66-minute epic. Good point. If side one of 2112 was comprised of seven short songs and not one big, multi-parter, we would most likely consider it the conceptual side of the 2112 album, and not an epic. Once FM-friendly albums stole the spotlight from AM singles, making an epic was what the cool kids did. Is any mainstream band making epics anymore? Maybe what Iron Maiden has been doing for the past 12 years is as close as we'll get. No, there aren't any more 13-minute "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"s being recorded, but I'd say a 70-minute album of dense, heavy, 8-minute prog songs is the 21st century replacement for a Tales From Topographic Oceans. And that's pretty much what Rush is doing now, too.

If I'm not mistaken, that is of course, the Starman from 2112, but with the type logo from Moving Pictures. Nice.

Yeah, I know I left off a lot of good songs. I just had to draw the line somewhere. Yes, the songs you guys list are slower, but some off them really ROCK in parts. Like the end of Losing It. When in doubt, I gave a listen and excluded songs where they went a little Nobody called out Witch Hunt, which is quite slow. I left it out because it's very menacing. I was going for more of a or feel.

I like the random approach, which gave me this: By-Tor & The Snow Dog Test For Echo Halo Effect 2112: VI Soliloquy Way the Wind Blows Prime Mover Dreamline 2112: V Oracle: The Dream Seven and Seven Is Nobody's Hero Workin' Them Angels 2112: VII Grand Finale No too shabby. I get the back third of 2112 and some of my favorite tracks, like By-Tor and Nobody's Hero. My real list is: Xanadu Cygnus X-1 Book 2: 1 Prelude The Spirit of Radio The Camera Eye Subdivisions Red Sector A Marathon Time Stand Still The Pass Ghost of a Chance Cold Fire Far Cry

Thought it would be fun to gather opinions on what everyone's favorite slow moment is, since The Garden is the first somewhat tender song in quite a while.

QUOTE I think she thinks any lead guitar is just noise unless it the mindless strumming of a country star. Oh, then obviously she'd love Rivendell.