After all, to quote him, “Everybody got to deviate/From the norm.” With Lifeson playing up- and downstrokes, Moving Pictures’ “Vital Signs” shows the most obvious signs of Police work, but the sequencer may bear the influence of Peart’s beloved Ultravox. Rush experimented with a slight skank on Permanent Waves’ “The Spirit of Radio,” which might explain why it became an actual hit in reggae-drenched England than in an America that went through the trouble of keeping Black disco-tinged acts off the air. To absorb Black rhythms through the filter of another white trio works as insurance: It’s less fraught to get blamed for borrowing from people who look like you. Someone in the Rush dressing room must have loved the Police who were, at the time, three albums into a career that would turn them into the world’s biggest band and most fractious trio. Taking seriously the notions of progress espoused by their lyrics, Rush must have noticed these bright, shiny tunes on the FM dial mostly recorded by younger men whose brevity matched their hair length.Īnd rhythms too! Not quite mystic ones, but Rush’s instrumental chops and charming, gawky futurism produced a supple incorporation of dub and reggae. Instead of three- and four-minute things like “Fly By Night,” “The Trees,” and “Closer to the Heart” acting like smoke breaks between epics, the ten-minute “The Camera Eye” is the anomaly amid a suite of often severe tunes with choruses and middle-eights. Released in 1981, their eighth studio album-reissued in honor of its 40th anniversary in a sumptuous multidisc/multi-LP set-mastered concision. Touring had taught Rush the interior design of their own material. When they discovered they could sound pretty on A Farewell to Kings’ “ Closer to the Heart,” it was a glass of wine after years of grape juice.
With Rush, though, there was a turbulence, an aversion to the ornamental. Now that no one younger than 50 gives a damn about why punk recoiled from prog, those albums before 1980 offer solid, stolid musical elongations on the addled fiction familiar to, say, fans of Genesis’ 1973 album Selling England by the Pound. young enough) to laud the “genius of Ayn Rand” in the liner notes to 2112 (1976), Rush flitted through the decade setting their influences to music.
0 kommentar(er)
