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Which is the best Rush album of the new millennium?


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Millennial Rush Shootout  

31 members have voted

  1. 1. Which is the best of Rush's last three albums?

    • Vapor Trails
    • Snakes & Arrows
    • Clockwork Angels


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I figured I'd beat treeduck to the punch and start my own album shootout thread before he gets to it.

 

This time it's the last three albums up for discussion: Vapor Trails, Snakes & Arrows, and Clockwork Angels.

 

It's no contest, in my opinion: VT wins hands down. A stunning return to form for the band, so unlike anything they'd done before that it may very well be its own genre. The lyrics are dark and heavy, but also woven with threads of defiant optimism and infused with celestial imagery. It is unquestionably Neil's artistic peak as a wordsmith. It's also the last Rush album with truly great artwork. The bold and fiery abstract cover painting; Hugh's portraits of the guys; the tarot card imagery in the lyric booklet; the black, white, red and orange colour scheme - all of it works seamlessly in a way that sums up the music within. VT is up there with Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures as one of the band's defining artistic statements.

 

S&A, on the other hand, hasn't aged all that well for me. I liked it quite a bit when it was first released, but with time and distance I've come to find the lyrics to be the weak point. With a few exceptions, it doesn't say much that hasn't already been said in Freewill and Roll the Bones, and I just can't get excited about 60 minutes of harping about religion. Musically it has moments of brilliance, but many of the songs sound disjointed and uninspired. There's enough good in it that I still consider it a mid-tier album, but it never rises into the upper half of the album rankings for me.

 

Clockwork Angels - and I know I'm going to be a tiny minority here - is the worst album in the band's catalogue, in my opinion. I've tried to like it, but it simply doesn't work for me. I hate steampunk, I don't like carnivals, and I don't really care for concept albums based on a fictional story. Aside from The Garden, none of the songs really stand on their own, so you either have to buy into the story or just forget about the lyrics. I can't do either, so the album is a failure in my eyes. That said, it DOES have The Garden, which is a monumental work of art, a brilliant summation of a lifetime of experience and wisdom. If S&A had ended with The Garden, it would have almost single-handedly redeemed the album.

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It's got to be CA. While there are weak points, a rip-roaring career retrospective track like "Headlong Flight" is magnificent and is a "best of" track for me. I love the heaviness of "BU2B" and the storytelling of "The Wreckers." Plus, it has the perfectly melancholy tone to end an album and career, with "Wish Them Well" and "The Garden."

 

SnA has a handful of songs I quite like, too, so I think Vapor Trails (remixed or not) is probably third. I return to listen to it very rarely, and I think most of my exuberance about it has to do with the fact it was just some new Rush, dammit. "One Little Victory" and "Ceiling Unlimited" are stone cold jams, though, no question.

 

CA

Snakes

VT

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All three albums are heavily flawed IMHO.

So I would have liked to combine the positive from these albums into one awesome album:

The emotion passion and energy of Vapor Trails with the much better mix of Snakes in a concept story line format of Clockwork

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All three are longer than they need to be. Properly trimmed, Clockwork has the best music by far. Vapor Trails is the best lyrical and thematic achievement. Snakes is the best sounding, and would be a marvelous of an EP.

 

Full album, VT takes top billing. A truncated, re-ordered CA is my personal favorite. Snakes has great instrumentals, but the balance of songs aren't much fun and have aged the worst thematically.

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