diatribein

What part(s) about Bravest Face do you like more than Natural Science? Guitars? Bass? Drums? Vocals? Lyrics? Melody? Other? Lyrics, melody, chorus, acoustic guitar riff.

1. Grace Under Pressure 2. Power Windows 3. Permanent Waves 4. Moving Pictures 5. Snakes & Arrows 6. Roll the Bones 7. Hold Your Fire 8. Test for Echo 9. Signals 10. Presto 11. Counterparts 12. Vapor Trails Remixed 13. A Farewell to Kings 14. Clockwork Angels 15. 2112 16. Fly by Night 17. Hemispheres 18. Caress of Steel 19. Rush

Nothing from Caress Of Steel in my Top 20, 5 out 8 from Power Windows in my Top 20. No contest for me.

Not as good as Bravest Face, but up there as one of their better songs.

You're trippin', Gremlins 2 is great! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x01l_jMhjVM I WAS tripping! I misread the question and thought it was what sequel was better than the original. I have no idea what I was thinking. I LOVE Gremlins 2: The New Batch!!!

Gremlins 2: The New Batch None of these.

Top 5: 1. A View To a Kill 2. Thunderball 3. Golden Eye 4. Live and Let Die 5. Moonraker A View To a Kill was the first Bond movie that I was old enough to see in the theatres so it holds a special place in my heart. Plus, I was a HUGE Duran Duran fan in 1985. That, and Christopher Walken & Grace Jones make this easily my favourite Bond film. I think overall I like Sean Connery better than Roger Moore, but I seem to like stories in the Moore films more. I hate the reboots and Timothy Dalton as Bond as well.

Good question here. Snakes & Arrows and Power Windows are among the best albums ever released by the band. Fly By Night, although a significant improvement over debut, is still mostly mired in that early Led Zeppelin clone sound. Presto suffers from bad production and a huge drop off in songwriting from the halcyon synth era albums, but is still good; I would rank it as the 10th best album. Certainly not top 5 like Snakes & Arrows and Power Windows.

Again voting for the least popular! I think you all like what I dislike about pre-1980 RUSH.

You people and the damn instrumentals! Temples of Syrinx by a mile!

One of the best 3 songs on a stellar album full of great songs. LOVE IT!!! Awesome lyrics with some of Alex's best guitar work.

I would take ANY synth era album over any prog era album. The closest match is between A Farewell To Kings and Signals; I still like Signals more.

This is my favourite 70s RUSH song, so it is in the top 25 overall.

Snoozeworthy

Most poles on TRF are useless because they contain a lot of bullshit options which prevent an acurate result. There are poles on TRF? :P According to my Poll here: http://www.therushforum.com/index.php?/topic/103149-favourite-poll-of-poles-and-polls/ there are at least two Poles on TRF! :drool:

Honestly, the only thing I would ask is for them to listen to my wife's awesome latest CD and if they liked it to pass it on to someone who could make things happen for her. Shameless plug: https://roriekelly.bandcamp.com Otherwise, I would try to engage with Neil on some political discussions because I think we'd get along there. I would talk to Geddy about baseball and with Alex I would just try to make him laugh by joking around. Mostly I'd want them to enjoy hanging out with me and not make them feel like they were tolerating a fan.

1. Snakes And Arrows (By Far) 2. Roll The Bones 3. Hold Your Fire Least: Caress Of Steel, Hemispheres, 2112.

So will the Cylons actually be created by an alien race rather than the toasters gone wrong scenario of the 2003 reboot? That was one of the changes that annoyed me the most.

Snakes And Arrows was a brilliant return to form and the last RUSH album to make my personal Top 5. The follow up was probably the most disappointing RUSH release ever and the worst album of originals released by the band in 33 years. So for me the run stops at Snakes And Arrows.

I think you are talking about the poll before this Nope. CP is more painful than a kick to the nuts, and it scared off a lot of fans who came back to Rush for RTB. Uh, really? Just who are these fans who "came back" for RTB? And why the hell would they? For Roll The Friggin' Bones??? We all get that you hate Counterparts, but RTB certainly wasn't a step back towards classic Rush either. And that's putting it mildly. Every album from MP to Presto sold fewer than the one before it...HYF and Presto went gold. RTB went platinum, and CP went gold. I'll take your word for it that CP sold less than RTB because I honestly don't know (or care, really). But higher sales doesn't prove quality. You claimed that RTB sold better because many previous Rush fans "came back". I would say that more likely it sold well because NEW fans were being drawn in from Rush being lost musically and continuing to pander to the mainstream. RTB could not sound any less like classic Rush. If anything, CP was the album that drew old fans back because it at least showed them back to a heavy guitar driven sound reminiscent of their classic period. Whether people prefer that or a softer sound like RTB is just opinion. One last thing you have to remember is that grunge mania was in full force by the mid 90s. ALL hard rock/ metal acts starting selling less. I think maybe you need a personal story to help you realize how much Roll The Bones meant to some of us. Background: I was a little kid when Grace Under Pressure came out and I loved it. When Power Windows came out I bought it on cassette and loved it too. In 1987, still not a teenager, I bought Hold Your Fire on vinyl and liked it a tiny bit less than the previous two albums. Over the next two years I started listening to a lot of other bands and RUSH became less important to me. When Presto came out I bought it and listened to it but not as much as any of the previous albums. I had lost interest. Another two years passes and I was firmly in my teenage years. Roll The Bones came out and I was a little more circumspect because I hadn't connected well with Presto. In the interim I had bought Archives, A Show Of Hands, and Chronicles. I liked the live album, enjoyed some of the songs that were new to me on Chronicles and hated the 3 albums on Archives. I remember putting Roll The Bones on my turntable and thinking WOAH.. They are BACK! The keyboards that had been tucked away on Presto were once again more prominent and the songwriting was so much better. I really enjoyed most of the album right away. I listened to that album a lot and it was in that time period that I went and bought all of the old albums, largely because the latest album was connecting with me so well. Roll The Bones definitely reinvigorated my fandom after Presto. In contrast, I actually remember the day Counterparts came out because I was in the US at the time and people were doing the midnight lining-up thing they did back then. I think I saw the video for Stick It Out and it made me sad. Where were the keyboards? It sounded like they were trying to chase the in vogue grunge sound too. At the time, I personally had a lot of animosity towards that sound because there was a real sense that it had become the only acceptable rock style and if you didn't sound like that your career was over. I didn't buy Counterparts that day. I waited until I was back in Europe and bought the German CD because it had a fancy case. I didn't even buy the German vinyl (which I regret to no end today) because I don't remember seeing it and I wasn't as invested. The complete lack of any synthesizers on Counterparts was a real drawback for me and I never really listened to the album. It was so bad that I didn't even bother with Test For Echo until years after it had been released. When I finally got it, I realized that Test For Echo really did remedy some of what I disliked about Counterparts, but it wasn't as good as Roll The Bones in my opinion. So maybe none of those classic RUSH fans who think Caress Of Steel is a masterpiece came back for Roll The Bones, but certainly some of us that were big fans of the synth era did find their way back into the fold for Roll The Bones.

Thanks for writing this! I agree with everything you said. I expected there to be a few more NO votes for the first question too and I also think some people are underestimating how having Presto be the first album would effect their fandom. The newcomers in Rock releasing their first album in 1989 that had some level of success right away were bands like Warrant, Skid Row, and Extreme. Bands like Nirvana, Green Day, and The Offspring also debuted in 1989, but they were not well known until the 90s and signed to indie labels. How Presto would fit into this mix as a debut album is unknown, but I would expect that it would be received more closely to the former three than the latter. We all know that those bands were swept away 4 years later by the alternative revolution. Me personally, I love everything released by Warrant (with Jani Lane) and Extreme / Nuno Bettencourt even after the 1993 cull, but most people moved on. I used that fact to try to extrapolate whether or not Presto would lead me to continue to be a fan of the band until the end of their career. The problem with that sort of thinking is that RUSH only got to continue to have major label releases after 1993 because they had been around for much longer and had a fan base that gutted it through changes in the music industry. Either way, I still would have been a fan. Presto, Roll The Bones, Counterparts, and Test For Echo were all good enough for me to solidify a bond with the band that I would not break. The entire poll for me is very different than for most of the people responding though, because I see the 70s albums more as dead weight than music that drives my fandom. I came along in 1984 with Grace Under Pressure and until 1988 only had Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, and Hold Your Fire in my collection. Those were the albums that made me a fan. It wasn't until 1988 that I started to buy some of the older albums. I think one of the first things I bought was Archives (collection of first 3 albums) and I NEVER listened to it again after one or two plays of each album. To be honest, I hated them. It just wasn't the kind of music I was into and I didn't really see much of what I loved about Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, and Hold Your Fire in any of those albums. I don't think it was until after I bought Chronicles that I started to listen to the pre-1984 songs and started to like songs like Fly By Night and Lakeside Park. It was then, after Presto had been release, after Chronicles came out that I started looking for more of the older albums. I loved the songs from Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures on Chronicles and I ended up loving those albums too, but I never got as deeply into the 70s material. It just wasn't the RUSH I knew and loved. I love select tracks here and there (Circumstances, Cinderella Man, Something For Nothing), but none of it ever meant as much to me as those mid to late 80s albums and even the music they made in the 90s and 00s. I know my expreience is very different from the majority here, so I would expect a lot more NOs in the votes.

Brilliant! I love this and I would have to agree!!!

Second Nature is one of my all time favourite RUSH songs along with Prime Mover and Turn The Page. I especially like the lyrics of Second Nature. This is some of Neil Peart's best work and really touches on the crux of important social issues. I absolutely LOVE it! This is a really strong album from start to end, only slightly less awesome than the two that preceded it. The only song I would have taken off is Tai Shan, but I also find Lock And Key & Mission to be a little weaker than most of the rest of the album. .

Never have understood the hate for this album. I mean, you knew up front they were cover songs. I think the did a terrific job on all of them. Maybe it has to do with the finite nature of time and the career of a band. If RUSH only ever had 20 albums in them, I think most fans would trade an album of covers for a new original album any day. Vapor Trails was released in May of 2002 while Snakes And Arrows came out in May of 2007; in-between we got Feedback in June of 2004. Even if it is an EP and not a full length album, I would have much preferred an originals release sometime in late 2004 over a covers album. It is just a waste of time and effort for me. The time the three of them had left in their careers in the studio recording together was already so fleeting by 2004, that it feels like such a disappointment not to get something truly RUSH rather than this collection. That said, we all understand that, especially the way they work, that recording 8 covers is a completely different undertaking than 8 original songs, but I would have taken 5 or 6 originals over any number of covers. An EP of originals would have been more than welcome as far as I am concerned. So I think that the hate over Feedback has little to do with what it actually is, but has everything to do with what it isn't. It probably reminds fans of what could have been if only different choices were made. I'm generally not a fan of covers regardless of the band undertaking them, so Feedback just ends up being a RUSH album in my collection that means as much to me as Chronicles or Retrospective III. It is there. It exists. I look at it thinking "well... this happened" and never listen to it. I would have at least listened to an EP of new originals released in 2004 many, many times. I can count on one hand how many times I've listened to Feedback straight through. .

I thought about doing Grace Under Pressure for the second choice because it would be more evenly distributed (two albums between each choice), but ultimately I felt like the style shift was a little more pronounced between Moving Pictures and Signals than Signals and Grace Under Pressure. Also, the fact that both Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures are so highly regarded on the board influenced my choice. I am basically asking what is the difference in drop-off between those who need the 70s material to fuel their fandom versus the ones who could still love the band as long as they had those two iconic albums in their catalogue. If I add Signals to that cohort, I could be bringing in a whole different group of fans and lose the ability to pinpoint how important Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures are to some fans.