Roadrunner (label)
09 July 2012 (released)
23 June 2012
Welcome back my friends to the band that never ends – thank whatever gods you have got.
This is Rush’ 20th studio album and their first for 5 years and there is an absolute sense here that they have recharged batteries and gone to a place where they wanted to produce a new album – this is no ‘contractual obligation’.
The theme of the album, yes this is prog so there has to be a theme, is a reworking of Voltaire’s ‘Candide’. In the original Voltaire muses on the concept of hope in times of peril and Neil Peart has taken it and written his own musing on the loss of his daughter, wife and drum mentor in a very short space of time. Anyone familiar with the band will know that Peart disappeared for a long, solitary trip to get over the loss in a year of first his daughter and them his wife and when he returned his drum mentor and teacher, Freddie Gruber, also passed. Anyone else might have produced an album of brooding melancholy and darkness but this is Rush and the album positively quivers with the power and intellectual brio of the band.
The songs have all the power and intricate interplay of Rush at their peak and if Geddy Lee can’t hit the ridiculously high notes of his youth he still shows a vocal range that walks all over the competition. Alex Lifeson’s guitar playing has never been pigeon-hole-able but he is showing metal riffs he has never even hinted at before as well as some searing solos. As ever, Neil Peart is the driving force behind the band and he continues to do more work with his kit than any 10 other drummers without ever sounding ‘flash’ or overblowing the music. Go and see Rush live and you will clearly as many fans ‘air-drumming’ as playing ‘air guitar.
The lyrics take a different slant from Voltaire but they still have plenty of emotion behind the intellectual interplay and three or four of the songs will find their way to being fan favourites in the immediate future – ‘BU2B’ and ‘Caravan’ were already performed on the ‘Time Machine’ tour and I can see ‘The Anarchist’ joining them soon.
Nick Raskulinecz co-produced (as he did on Snakes and Arrows) and the pairing with the band is clean and retains all the historical power of the band but keeps it as modern as tomorrow.
Definitely a contender for album of the year.
