LogFAQs > #933313219

NBIceman posted...

Never clicked the "Track Topic" button so fast in my life.

Glad to hear it! Even without the topics about Neil's death I knew we had at least a few fans on the board, which is one of the reasons I actually went through with doing this. Even if it's at least as much an exercise in self-indulgence, getting a few things off my chest and semi-publicly sorting out some emotions as anything.

18. Rush
What's Special: Working Man
Why So Low: The lack of Peart shows and hurts.

Anybody who's enough of a fan of Rush to know their history doesn't need me to tell them that before Peart joined, they were basically Led Zeppelin disciples. Which was fine. All three of the guys had the technical skill to pull it off. John Rutsey will basically never any respect as a drummer because he was replaced by the greatest drummer to ever live, but this album shows he was at least technically solid - there's really nothing to complain about with the instrumentation and performances on the album. The failing, though, is that Geddy and Alex are not nearly as good of song writers as they are performers, and a lot of these tracks fall into "So stereotypically 70s rock that they don't quite feel like Rush" or "A bit cringey in the lyrics department" (Shoutouts to In The Mood). This album ultimately suffers from a lot of the same forgettable-ness as I complained about with Test For Echo, even if it's more excusable in this case because it was a group of guys in search of a style, and not a long-established band that had been playing together for 20 years.

Ultimately, this album does mean a fair bit to me. As I would imagine is fairly common for younger folks who are into older bands, I was introduced to Rush by my dad, who had two Rush CDs. This one and a greatest hits collection. And he absolutely loves Working Man. Or more accurately, as a blue-collar family man type of person, he very strongly identifies with that song. Thanks to him, I was listening to it long before I knew basically anything about music, let alone things that weren't played on the radio. And as I discovered and got into Rush 'properly' as a teenager, it really wouldn't even be a mistake to say I bonded with my dad all over again using this song, just listening to it with him (And using it to get him to listen to some of the lesser-known tracks on other albums) while we sat around and talked about nothing of consequence. If I were ranking individual songs, it'd place far higher than it probably would objectively "deserve" to (And it would deserve to rank decently high to begin with) just on account of that.

Unfortunately though, that's just one song. And for my money, the only other standout great song on this album is Finding My Way, which is a fun, high-energy piece that I think best captures the Pre-Peart style of the band (Relatively generic as it may have been), with cool riffs and the best vocal performance on the album IMO. On another relatively high note, Here Again is the band's first attempt at a ballad, and while it doesn't hit the mark nearly as well as some of their later attempts it's definitely good in its own right and does a good job of breaking up the rest of the album and keeping it from being a straight up parade of 70s hard rock. Aside from the aforementioned utter cheesiness of In The Mood (Which can still be fun to listen to, but requires a very specific, well, mood), the rest of this album is solid-but-unspectacular. Which is fine, though if it were the first Rush album I actually sat down and listened to in full (I didn't, even though it was the one my parents actually owned at the time, because I was a dumbass teenager LMAO), I may not have fallen in love with the band the way I did. Even at that age, I was familiar with all of the typical classic rock radio hits courtesy of my parents (I was actually about as big a fan of the Eagles as I could've been at the time considering my age and interest in the finer points of music), and I may very well have written them off as "ordinary classic rock band, with higher-pitched vocals than most bands". Instead I've got something I can respect as the band's roots, and something that gives me a lot more appreciation for Peart's songwriting talents.

And even though some of this sounds pretty critical and negative (especially in context of the low ranking), I feel the need to note that I still enjoy this album. I am simply holding it to a far higher standard than I would if $Generic70sBand released it for the same reason I was negative on Test For Echo. Rush is just better than that, even if this album is a very different Rush than the other 18 I will be discussing.