Rush

It's fairly common to view transitional works as minor entries in an artist's career, so much so that what should be a neutral descriptor usually ends up being used with a negative connotation. And yet transitional works often possess a greater variety of nuances than both what came before and what came after: having begun to clear out the old style, but not yet fully settled into the new one, they end up taking on the traits of both, achieving a completeness that's hard to replicate. Still, it's precisely these qualities, often perceived as clashing or poorly blended, that earn such records their negative reputation.

Released in February 1981, "Moving Pictures" is widely recognized as the masterpiece of Rush. The album has always been praised for its balance, its clean sound, its production quality, the immediacy of its melodies, and its ability to give Rush's music a pop sheen without diminishing its architecture. But its greatest merit is precisely that of being a transitional album. It can in fact be regarded either as their last record tied to the blend of progressive rock and arena hard rock that made them famous, or as the first of their technological phase, furrowed by new wave textures and heavy electronic interference.

While no one likes to label it a transitional work, since that would seem to diminish it, the truth is that no greater compliment could be paid to an album that, thanks to this fusion, encapsulates the entire universe built by the Canadian trio. A parallel world where music and geometry worked in perfect synthesis for almost twenty years, before eventually running out of steam and repeating themselves beyond what was necessary.

With "Permanent Waves", the year before, Rush had for the first time cracked the upper reaches of the international charts. "Moving Pictures" is thus the first album recorded in the condition of established rock stars (though they'd already been filling arenas for a few years, it's also true that their name had never spread beyond the circle of devoted fans before the legendary single "Spirit Of The Radio"). The tension was palpable, and as the ambition of the arrangements grew, along with the challenge of embracing new technologies, the band found themselves running over the time allotted for the sessions. In the end, though, the record reached stores without any major delay.

Success was immediate and overwhelming: number 3 in the UK, number 3 in the US, number 2 in Canada, and over five million copies sold in the English-speaking market alone. Although they would go on to enjoy plenty of other satisfactions, Rush would never again achieve results like these. A record like this, after all, is the kind that defines an era and echoes for decades to come.

In the control room, alongside the band's three members, sat the trusty Terry Brown, who had been with them since 1975. The resourceful producer was essential both for overcoming technical limitations during mixing and in the use of the new keyboards, and for lending dynamism to the sound, for instance by adjusting the placement and filtering of the drum microphones.

The tracklist opens with the metallic radiation of the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer and a drum pattern syncopated beyond the apparent limits of possibility. Five seconds pass before Geddy Lee's vocal entrance, with his high, feminine tone, but they're five seconds carved in granite, one of the most distinctive instrumental intros in popular music. A handful of moments is all it takes for "Tom Sawyer" to change the course of rock's collective imagination.

Then come Alex Lifeson's thunderous guitar riffs at breakneck speed, an instrumental interlude in odd time signatures, drumming that hits like machine-gun fire, and a series of now-classic riffs (above all the synth riff at 1' 33", a variation of which later carries the track toward its finale).

Rush's instrumental mastery is such that, among non-English-speaking audiences, one of their most important components tends to be underrated: the words. Penned by drummer Neil Peart, the lyrics blend science fiction, philosophy, adolescent visions and emotional outpourings, in a perfect balance of ambition, depth and candour (naivety, the more spiteful will say, if it weren't for the fact that this is an element that's very often healthy for rock music).

Peart starts out from a poem by his friend Pye Dubois and turns it into an anthem to individualism, though far removed from mere rebellion: "Though his mind is not for rent, don't put him down as arrogant." "Her reserve is a mild defense, as she rises above everyday events". The individual comes to define themselves only through the reflection they see in the eyes of others: "Today's Tom Sawyer is crazy about you, and invades your space, he cuts in front of you".

These are lyrics that accurately paint Peart's feelings and his inner conflict. On one hand, the need for independent thought (already tackled in "Freewill", from "Permanent Waves"), on the other, the warmth - illusory or not - that comes from a sense of belonging (a theme later dissected in "Subdivisions", from "Signals").

The second track is "Red Barchetta", a dystopian scenario that's both ironic and unsettling, inspired by a short story by Richard S. Foster in which driving old cars is illegal. The protagonist finds himself hunted down when he decides to take one out for a joyride, but manages to make it home safe. Packed with action, the events are perfectly mirrored in the music, which shifts constantly in speed, pace and texture. Lifeson opens and closes the track with delicate harmonics, alternating hard-rock riffs with sharp, countersteered guitar stabs of clear new wave inspiration. His admiration for the Police is, after all, well documented.

Influenced instead by Chris Squire of Yes, Lee crafts a mutant, melodic bassline, mixed quite prominently, laying down blankets of synthesizers in the more relaxed passages. The vocal melody, more soaring than ever, shows that Rush's arena-rock instincts haven't been overwhelmed by new trends - if anything, they've come out reinvigorated, youthful, and projected toward the future.

"YYZ", inspired by a code the band heard at Toronto airport, is an instrumental in odd time signatures, a puzzle of rhythmic interlocking and sudden turns. It's one of the rare tracks in the group's catalogue that Lifeson didn't have a hand in composing, yet his metallic riffs and Eastern-tinged solo define it just as much as Lee's synthetic layers and Peart's drumming, ever more jagged and full of micro-fractures.

"Limelight", which could be seen as an evolved take on power pop, showcases Lee's voice at its cleanest and most melancholy, as if to counterbalance the tension of the lyrics, which recount Peart's struggles in coping with success ("In this tumbled generation, ill-equipped and dilettante, one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact"). Despite seeming like one of the album's more straightforward tracks, it's actually one of its most intricate, alternating and layering passages in 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8. It stands as one of the high points of Rush's mimicry, and of their ability to make structures that would sound unnatural for most other bands seem effortless.

"The Camera Eye", to this day their last track to break the ten-minute mark, portrays the streets of New York and London and the feelings that run through them, piling up a multitude of themes and digressions, with guitars and synthesizers unfurling evocative embroidery and cutting assaults alike. There's room for rhythmic acoustic guitar interjections, while the electronic section briefly brushes up against video-game music, making it one of their richest creations in terms of tone. The atmosphere is fairly rarefied during the sung parts, hardening during the instrumental passages.

"Witch Hunt" is the anthem that indicts the fear of diversity, and it's so relevant today it could have been written yesterday. "Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand."

The message is driven forward at a marching pace, with Lee unleashing a torrent of keyboards and electronic backing vocals, while Peart lays down a manic percussive framework underneath, drawing on gongs, wind chimes, glockenspiel, conga, cowbell and electronic effects, retuning parts of his drum kit and, in places, recording the same line multiple times before layering the different takes together.

The reggae influence that had already surfaced on "Permanent Waves" spills over into the closing "Vital Signs", which for that matter definitively casts Rush's gaze toward their future and their new wave phase. A sequencer accompanies the track at several points with a frenetic sixteenth-note bubbling, while the drum machine in the bridge running from 0′ 45″ to 1′ 15″ is actually a regular drum kit, specifically tuned by Brown to achieve that plastic, unnatural sound. Rush's philosophy is sealed by Lee, who ethereally declaims: "Everybody's got a face made for changing, everybody's got mixed feelings about the function and the form. Everybody's got to elevate from the norm."

The trio have never been particularly well liked by critics rooted in singer-songwriter tradition and classic rock, but they're worshipped like gods by those coming from prog and metal. It took more than forty years before Rolling Stone magazine, in June 2015, granted them the cover, crowning them "geek gods". Their music, however, goes well beyond that label: any sensibility that strays from the standard actually has something in common with Rush, three small-town kids who dreamed of success and, once they achieved it, used it to give voice to the feelings of those who feel trapped by the very reality they themselves managed to escape.

That's why they've sold twenty-five million records in the United States alone, making music more elaborate than anyone else who has achieved similar numbers. Because beyond being superb musicians, they carried a message, a positive and inclusive vision, one that in 2016 still seems very much needed.

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17/07/2016