Rush Didact

I roped my brother into buying a ticket for me this morning, so all's well! I have a feeling the Toronto show is going to sell pretty well.

Of course these pre-sales are happening while I'm way out of cell service! Arrrgggghhhh.

Amazing to see this. That's the Rush I remember, I saw them just days later in Darien Lake. God that was such an exciting tour...

Ugh, I really hope it isn't an AmEx presale in Canada. I'm not signing up for a stupid credit card just to buy a seat for this thing...

Ah, that would make more sense...

Wait, you FLY places within the UK?? Can't you drive or take a train anywhere in the country within a couple hours? Sorry, this is coming from a Canadian perspective, where any drive you can do within a single day is considered short. Unless I'm going to another province it would never occur to me to use a plane.

I think you're overthinking things a bit. That's about as on-the-nose as you can get for the name of a music label; the only really surprising thing about the choice is that no one else had called their label Anthem before Rush did. The fact that it's also the name of a song the band wrote is just icing on the cake.

With those numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if a Toronto stop gets booked at Massey Hall...

Eh, it's a lot cheaper than most big name concerts these days. It'll sell. I would assume Ged's people have done some market research.

I'll be going when a Toronto date is announced, regardless of cost. (Unless it's truly obscene, anyways.) Any idea what qualifies someone for the pre-sales for these? Is subscribing to the rush.com newsletter enough?

Good grief, they were teenagers. What's the point?

I wonder if the book is going to be sold on the Rush website...

I think from the 90s onwards, it's equally Ged and Al. Listen to their solo albums and you can hear what each of them contribute to the mixing process. Victor is an atrocious sounding album, the heavier songs are a straight up assault on the ears with painful amounts of upper mids and treble. MFH is better behaved and not as hard on the ears, but the overall mix is bloated and murky and it's the first time Ged's bass tone starts to take on that clanky, mechanical sound he had for the rest of Rush's career. When you combine bloated and murky with painful amounts of upper mids and treble, what do you get? Vapor Trails. You get Vapor Trails.

That's a damned good question. I can't stand the production of HYF, it's shrill and grainy and muffled all at once. The drums sound dead (good god, what the hell did they do to the kick drum?), the guitar sounds like crap, the bass is all twang with no oomph. It's the polar opposite of PoW, which is one of the best sounding albums the band ever released. And yet both albums were produced by Peter Collins and engineered by James "Jimbo" Barton. How they got such wildly different results is beyond me. I would love to hear a remix of HYF, but I'm afraid the band would give it to some dunce like Dave Bottrill again who would try to turn it into a metal album.

I'm not a fan of p/g's production, I find it to be a dry and sterile album with none of the creativity and life that Peter Collins brought to PoW. There's nothing specifically wrong with it, but there's also nothing specifically right about it either.