Sometimes you can tell things are really off, just by looking at the album cover. And Changes, the ninth album from The Monkees, is clearly no exception to that particular manifesto. Where is everyone, and why is everyone decked out like Variety Show extras? And did I say The Monkees? I meant What Was Left…
I don’t think Rush ever had such a clearly-defined demarcation point — as a band/creative entity — as their 1980 landmark release Permanent Waves. After the arduous process of recording their previous album, 1979’s Hemispheres, the band felt they were ready to move on from their signature longer pieces, filled with virtuoso musicianship, multiple stylistic…
By 1968, The Monkees had passed their zenith as a commercial entity. Their April album release The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees earned considerable success (although less successful than their previous five albums), selling over a million copies and featured their hits “Valleri” and “Daydream Believer”. From that point on? Things weren’t quite so rosy. NBC…
Delving into an album like Instant Replay is a really strange exercise for Monkees faithful, and I’m specifically using the phrase “Monkees faithful”, because heck knows, nobody else would be ostensibly interested in this record. That’s not a criticism, either. Just an exercise in outright pragmatism. The album has no big hits on it, no…
Rush’s 2002 release Vapor Trails is a difficult album. It was, by all accounts, difficult for the band to record, taking over a year to produce after an extended period during which the band had effectively shut down. The album is also infamous for its unfortunate production quality; the audio is overly loud, distorted, cluttered,…
After the commercial failure of 1975’s Caress Of Steel and the ensuing disappointment of the resulting “Down The Tubes” tour, Rush was teetering on a precipice. Their album sales, pre-COS, were respectable but not exactly lighting up the stratosphere. Now with their first commercial dud, the label was on the verge of dropping the band…
The salad days of 1989 presented a fairly new situation for Rush. As the decade was waning, Messrs. Lee, Lifeson, and Peart were pretty far removed from their scrappy rock-prog early period, both in time and style. They surfed the oceans of hard rock, progressive rock, New Wave, synth rock, even a bit of post-punk…
Think of those instantly iconic albums. You know the ones I’m talking about, right? Given a band with a pretty vast catalog of recorded work, there is always at least one album that new fans, who have recently ‘discovered’ the band, gravitate towards for an ‘introductory’ or ‘statement-defining’ experience, beyond the standard “greatest hits” collection. For an act as…
It seems to be an all-too-common thing (almost cliché, really) for bands to put out an album of cover tunes, as a basic declaration of “this is where we come from” or “this is what influenced us” or “this is what we’ve been reduced to”, etc. You definitely would be hard-pressed to place Rush in…
Rush produced a low-key but respectable debut with their 1974 self-titled album, emerging as an energetic (if slightly derivative) blues-hard rock power trio from the Great White North. With the departure of original drummer John Rutsey, the band thrived with drummer/primary lyricist Neil Peart joining guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee, following up their debut…