LogFAQs > #933459946

16. Snakes and Arrows
Is good at: Portraying how Rush grew over 33 years together.
Would be better if: It gave me a strongly compelling reason to choose it over other Rush albums.

My progression through this album, from a "how much I like these as individual songs songs", is a bit strange. The first time I heard it, I clearly remember thinking that Workin' Them Angels, Bravest Face and Malignant Narcissism were the shit and some of the best things Rush had done. Then revisiting the album a year or so later, it was all about Faithless and Far Cry. And this was before I'd heard Far Cry live, which really elevated that song to another level for me with the sheer energy involved, even if it wasn't otherwise that different. I still think those first three tracks are pretty good, but I'm not nearly as high on them as my first impression was. Malignant Narcissim in particular I think stands out among Rush's instrumental tracks, probably only second to the ever-popular YYZ as my favorite among those, at a glance. I do think that The Main Monkey Business is just too long for what it is and gets overly repetitive though, while Hope suffers from the opposite problem - It takes a cool melody (especially since I do enjoy a good acoustic guitar piece from time to time) and it just doesn't take it anywhere in the 2 minutes that it runs.

Regardless, this was the newest album at the time that I first really got into Rush, and they were literally still touring for it at the time (Not that I knew that, nor would I have had the opportunity to attend a show even if I had), though by the time I actually got my hands on a copy and listened to it in full I had made my way through a decent bit of both their 70s and 80s material, and I thought I had a grasp of the band already. So this album being pretty different than what I was used to (both stylistically and thematically) came as a bit of a surprise to me even though I should've seen it coming with the stylistic disconnect between their 70s and 80s stuff. But hey, I was a dumbass teenager. And I was introduced to something that, in retrospect, I think can sort of be considered a happy medium between the grand, rock-driven style they had in the late 70s and their more synth-driven, less-'epic' 80s style. Like, I'll freely confess to not being an expert on music or anything, but this album pretty much feels to me like the sort of style 80s Rush would've put out if the synth wasn't a thing. It's a very good album that does a great job of capturing what Rush, as a band, is all about. But that's also part of the reason it doesn't rate higher here. It's well-rounded, all around very solid and has a couple great standout tracks. But everything still to come has either a reason to stand out beyond one or two specific tracks, plain ol' sentimental value that this album doesn't have for me, or both.

I never claimed this was an objective ranking, after all.