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…
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…
Put on your party hats and goat-skin leggings, guys and gals, because we’re celebrating today! That’s right! We’re talking Hokeyblog’s third birthday — three years ago today, we went live with an album review of Beatles For Sale, which got the attention of absolutely nobody, given that I had zero promotion, SEO, Q-rating, Alexa ranking,…
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…
(As always, all concert pics are courtesy of the lovely and talented Boots, whose buttkickin’ ninja camera skills amaze and delight Hokeyblog readers worldwide! Check out more of her work at Concert Girl and say hi for me!) We’ll get to the Rush R40 Live concert review in a moment, but first: a testimonial… I have this awesome…
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…
The highest compliment you can give Rush’s 1987 release Hold Your Fire is that, despite the further descent into/evolution towards 80s proggy-synth pop, the music still sounds quintessentially Lee/Lifeson/Peart. While the tableau onto which the band expressed their creative talents is a radical shift from the hard-hitting rock of the mid 70s, the epic discovery…