jnoble

4 hours ago, micgtr71 said:

I still think this is the pinnacle of Lee's bass playing. I love the lines, wish the sound was thicker, and wished he continued in this vein. Great melodies as well, but definitely dated. Still, I have a soft spot for it.

Yeah I didn’t really care for the flamenco style Lee adapted starting with Counterparts.  He was playing too many notes too fast from then onto the end of the bands career And the lines weren’t nearly as well thought out and melodic

4 hours ago, Rush Didact said:

 

It's not a matter of too much reverb, it's that all the damn instruments are crammed into the midrange.  The kick drum sounds like a muffled thump, the guitars have such a crazy upper mid boost that they're painful at high volumes, the bass is thin and twangy, and everything else sounds kind of grainy and indistinct.  It's a terrible sounding album, especially compared to the lush and full sounding Power Windows.  I don't know what happened to Peter Collins between 1985 and 1987, but he forgot how to use a mixing board.  Presto is actually a huge step up from HYF.

Lee was recording with a Wal bass, of course it sounded thin and twangy 

HFY and RTB are Rush's softest wimpiest sounding studio albums out of all of them. Presto was thin too but not as lush and overproduced 

Couple years ago on this forum somebody complained that the studio production of HYF made it sound "like cardboard". I totally understand that as I mentioned in my previous comment on this topic here there's just way too much reverb on everything. I wonder if the master tapes could be remixed to strip some of that out and make it sound more dry and natural and powerful?

6 hours ago, taurus said:

Another lower tier album for me, doesn't mean I don't like it but this one has 3 clunkers. Dog Years, Virtuality and Color of Right

 

Really like the title track, Driven and Half the World

I categorize Virtuality in the same lane as Spindrift... a great guitar riff in search of a better song

12 hours ago, currygoat11 said:

OK, first up, I'm 99% sure the "previously unreleased performance of “2112” from Tucson, Arizona 1978" as the Rush website says is NOT from Tucson, but rather sounds like the exact recording from the 5/28/79 show in Offenbach (near Frankfurt). 

Ian Grandy recorded that show in Offenbach.

And yes the speed of the song is TOO SLOW on the 40th anniv release. Very noticeable. Really a shame that they can't the the show location or speed right.

Reminds me of the 2112 40th anniv: "recently-rediscovered live version of the album track “The Twilight Zone,”  which plays EXTREMELY fast. I haven't measured it but Geddy sounds like a chipmunk. 

It's an abomination and I can't believe that got through quality control.

Exactly. That 2112 was absolutely from the Germany performance even with the odd skipping in the introduction whooshing sounds which I thought was a defect on my CD but apparently it was on the source material tape. And yes I don't know why they didn't pitch correct that Twilight Zone bootleg either. It's not like they didn't have the capability to do so. 

On 8/31/2022 at 9:36 PM, 78jazz said:

I hope we get a 40th anniversary box set that has a complete soundboard from a night that has no audience documentation.

 

Given that this hasn't happened yet, I won't hold my breath.

 

I will also add to Nova's point that I suspect GUP gets some sort of treatment because of the video (IIRC, it was said that all of the footage was found and that they were waiting out what was then the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war).

I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. I think if it really existed it would have been seen by now

I listen to this today possibly for the first time and I noticed... I don't know if anyone else has... that the key of the song is a half step slower than the proper key 2112 was played in like they pressed on the CD at the wrong speed.  It appears to be the same performance on the Hemis tour bootleg 'Black Forest' I have that separately and it doesn't sound that way. 

On a slightly similar note I can't hear Geddy's rhythm guitar playing whatsoever on the passage to Bangkok from the Pink Pop Festival show during the guitar solo. It's like they didn't mic his amp or something when he was playing his double neck and switched to the six string guitar. You can hear him playing though at the end of Xanadu

20 hours ago, taurus said:

This is when the technology of the cd and its' increased capacity and the expectation of longer albums, kicked in and I felt this album suffered because of it. Drop Tai Shan and High Water and the album improves quite a bit. I think I still feel that way. 

 

Lower tier record for me but I really like the live video from that tour. The live album was too short and doesn't feel like a complete show like their other live albums but the video was aces. 

If Open Secrets , High Water and Tai Shan didn't exist the album would be one of their best of the '80s IMHO. Yes it was soft lush and decidedly not hard rock but the arrangements melodies and music itself were very very good.  The of-its-era production with everything soaked in a thick layer of reverb especially the drums and vocals didn't help it from sounding dated years later. 

I like to pretend that the album ended appropriately with Turn The Page and the last two songs were bonus extras not intended for the original album. 

I liked it when it first came out and I remember being really excited when I heard the title track for the first time while at work played over local FM radio. And I remember in the very early days of the internet reading the pre-release song titles on the old TNMS site leaking the album title and myself insisting that Test For Echo was a working title not what the final product was going to be named... boy was I wrong about that lol

Unfortunately it didn't age well and I like the title track and yes I do like Half The World REM-ish as it is...the lyrics are sadly more appropriate now than they've ever been. What is also the beginning of trends in Rush's music that I didn't like all the way up to the end of the band... the dense over distorted layers of guitar and bass making the songs sound muddy, the quality of Neil's lyrics just weren't as compelling as they used to be, decidedly mediocre "meh" songwriting (Color Of Right, Totem, Carve Away The Stone) , Geddy's bass tone wasn't good and I didn't care for Alex's choice in guitar tones either. Something that would continue on Vapor Trails 5 years later.

I very rarely listen to it. The tour was good but the album was mediocre for their standards. 

I feel like I'm one of the few Rush fans who really enjoys this song 

On 6/21/2022 at 12:56 PM, Timbale said:

I think there are a bunch of interesting ideas on CA - I remember hearing the title track for the first time and thinking "I've never heard them play this kind of groove before".  After 19 or so albums, there probably aren't a lot of bands who could surprise you like that.  BUT, I personally find their post 2000 sound too muddy and too big/loud/crowded.  The drums are fine, sonically, I guess - I prefer earlier albums but the sound on CA isn't terrible... but the bass and especially the guitar are just sludgey to me - it sounds like a Foo Fighters record in terms of the biggness of the guitars, which is a real turn off to me.  It's not as insane as the original mix of VT, but I don't find it pleasant.  I feel like a song like The Wreckers is a tune you should be able to put on at a medium volume and have it sound "nice" - clear and defined with the vocal up front.  But like a lot of the album, it's a thing where I keep wanting to turn it up to hear more definition, but then I want to turn it down because it's too noisy.

 

And I'm sorry to say it, but Geddy's voice is just not enjoyable to listen to on most of it.  I wish he'd just continued to embrace his lower register the way he was doing around Presto.  I blame the producer for pushing him so everything could sound like "old Rush".

 

 

The idea was well intentioned but the final result left something to be desired. Of course it's just my opinion I know a lot of fans love it

I was always surprised they didn't do BS&M live on the Counterparts tour

3 hours ago, Entre_Perpetuo said:

fixed

Nah. RTB was one half great (RTB, Dreamline, Bravado, GOAC, WMT) and one half extremely mediocre (all the other songs) 

Rupert Hine's marshmallow soft gutless production did it no favors. 

1 hour ago, Rush Didact said:

 

To each their own.  The opening arpeggios in the title track always give me chills, I quite like that particular tone.  I can't say I've ever had a problem with his sound in that period, it beats the hell out of his ultra-thin single coil sound on Presto.

RTB was the worst "Alex album" even more so than Presto/HYF/PoW in terms of guitar tone & placement in the mix 

11 hours ago, Rush Didact said:

 

Sean Magee's 2015 remaster of Test for Echo is worth hearing.  The original master has fairly heavy limiting applied to it, but Magee mastered it with its full dynamic range intact.  It sounds excellent.  Not quite as excellent as Counterparts, the bass is still a little too muddy for my liking, but it's not badly mixed by any stretch of the imagination.

It wasn't just the mix, Alex's choice of guitar tones on that album was suspect 

On 6/17/2022 at 8:26 PM, Rush Didact said:

I don't disagree with you.  I don't mind a lot of the album musically, it has some good parts and some excellent playing and energy, but I really, really, really don't like the overall concept.  Like you said, it felt like a re-tread of TFoL and 2112, but with added steampunk and circus, none of which is my kind of thing.  It was the first time the band felt like they went backwards to me, instead of progressing and doing something new.

 

The atrocious mix didn't help matters.  It's a real shame that Rush sounded so awful for the last 20 years of their career.  From the 70s to the 90s, they were one of the best-produced and best-engineered bands around, every album up to Test for Echo was practically a master class in rock production.  But from Vapor Trails on, they went totally off the rails.  Their last three albums (four if you include Feedback) are sonic trash, they're virtually abusive to the ears and hard to sit through start to finish.

 

I hope that someday a good engineer who's an actual Rush fan, someone like Steven Wilson, gets their hands on the multitracks for those albums and remixes them properly.  It would be a labour of love, it would never really turn a profit, but I would love to hear those albums get their just desserts.

I consider Counterparts as their last really good sounding record. Everything after starting with TFE was a dense fuzzy overdistorted brickwalled too many layers of guitar/bass/vocals sonic mess. 

5 hours ago, bluefox4000 said:

 

my unpopular opinion is i'm not big on concept records in general.  if i wanted a story i'd pick up a book, lol.  just play me music man.  and since the music on CA is overlong not too engaging and badly produced.  it looses me on all counts.

 

Mick

I took the album out and gave it another try today while driving around. Nope, same results as always: I enjoy the introduction to most of the songs but once the words kick in my interest starts to fade around the two-minute mark and then my finger is soon jabbing the skip forward button on the CD player. And the process begins anew. 

Wish them Well is an incredibly mediocre weak-effort song especially for a band as talented as Rush. The guitar and drum parts are completely unimaginative, the lyric trite and forgettable. I find it hard to believe after they admitted they had a hard time with getting a good recording of the song that they didn't just decide to give up on it altogether and leave it on the editing room floor because the final result just sucks. 

If somebody remixed the harder songs on this album into shorter instrumentals... lyrics and storyline completely gone... because I do like a lot of the riffs and parts they came up with, I would enjoy that much better. 

On 6/17/2022 at 11:09 PM, bluefox4000 said:

 

i feel the same as you it is too long an album.  WAY too long.  i like your trimmed list.

 

but my main problem is yes indeed the album always sounded like shit.  nothing breaths un the mix and the only way t make it semi ok is too play it at a low volume.  otherwise you just get the sound of mud,

 

it's an awful mix.

 

and after the original Vapor Trails this was stunningly bad.

 

Mick

 

 

Basically, since I couldn't understand most of what Geddy was singing without the lyrics in front of me I couldn't follow the storyline. And since I couldn't follow the storyline the whole concept of the album was lost on me. And at that point my interest in continuing to listen goes down the drain rather quickly especially when some of the songs drone on two or three minutes longer than they really needed too. Take the title track for example: it starts off really well and builds up nicely but when it gets to that middle part where it sounds like Ged is singing through a cheap speakerphone a room away and even the most dedicated fan can't make out WTF he's saying, I hit the skip forward button. 

Which reminds me, it's been 10 years now and I've read the lyric sheet multiple times and I'm STILL completely unclear as to what exactly a "Clockwork Angel" is in context of the story

 

Great, now compared to the rest of you so far I'm going to come across like the turd in the punch bowl contrarian 

 

This is just my opinion so don't get angry but I find the album on the whole to be mostly unlistenable especially beginning to end. The songs are too long too dense too chaotic not enough hooks or parts that stick with you but above all I can't understand hardly a word Geddy is singing. Between his strained voice singing higher than he was capable of anymore, the bad mix and the wordy songs, he could be singing in a completely different language for all I knew.

 

I liked the return to an epic story however I thought what Peart came up with seemed like a warmed-over rehash of Fountain of Lamneth combined with 2112: (a young idealistic man sets out to see and taste the world in a futuristic dystopian communistic society spread out over several songs and at the end becomes disenchanted) 

 

So overall I appreciate their effort and the band was certainly happy with the results and so were many fans and that's great but I hardly ever listen to the album. I've tried several times over the years but can't get past the first three songs before putting something else on. It's audibly abusive. It's been relegated to drink coaster status. I have no idea how the band signed off on that awful mix Nick did with hardly any separation between the layers of instruments and vocals. 

 

Here's my idea of what would make a better album:

Total remix top to bottom. Nick R is not allowed anywhere near the board. 

Drop the weaker songs and rearrange the remaining songs into a different running order:

Clockwork Angels

Caravan 

BU2B

Anarchist

Carnies

Seven Cities

The Wreckers

Headlong Flight 

The Garden 

 

 

 

Well to be fair, Far Cry is one of the few songs on the entire album that sounds anything like the classic Rush

Wish Them Well sounds a lot like Green Day's Do You Know Your Enemy in the beginning

I think the muddy noise live sound started as far back as Counterparts. I rarely ever listen to Different Stages disc 1 or 2 because of how muddy and distorted it sounded

RTB is far and away the wimpiest sounding Rush album, even more so than HYF or Presto. Because as someone just pointed out, the songs were meant to rock out (Face Up, Neurotica) but are held in check by the thinnest weakest mix and sound ever. But it's not all on Rupert Hine, Alex was the one who was recording with such jangly tinny guitar tones and Geddy was still using his pinky-dinky Wal basses. You can't possibly record an aggressive sounding song with those particular guitars. And I don't know why Neil's drums sounded like Tupperware. (Think the beginning fill of You Bet Your Life)

RTB and original mix Vapor Trails are both almost unlistenable past four songs but for completely opposite reasons. One is lacking balls the other too loud and aggressive

Geddy's bass sound was better back then (IMHO) because he was playing through amps on stage which sounded warmer. I didn't really care for his tone after he switched to direct input starting in 1996 TFE tour. It was too bright/clangy/dirty. And in the years before that his Steinberger and Wals just didn't have the aggressive tone of his Ric & Fender Jazz

I guess he's keeping the majority of his PRS guitars