For rabid prog-rock followers, no archival oddity is price leaving within the mud. The dangerous information: Rush have at all times been a tidy bunch, by no means accumulating a lot of a scrap pile.
“There’s nothing there. There’s nothing left,” Geddy Lee instructed Rolling Stone in 2021, confirming the trio’s lack of leftovers. “There could be half-finished demos someplace the place we obtained midway via and went, ‘Oh, this track sucks.’ And it by no means obtained made.”
It is an admirable philosophy: If Rush have recorded any junk over 40-plus years, they’ve intentionally stored it buried. Why waste folks’s time with 5 barely totally different variations of “Tom Sawyer” when the unique is true there, nonetheless able to be savored? However we reside in an age when no band’s archives keep sacrosanct for too lengthy, when each arbitrary year-marker is an excuse for an additional reissue. Rush’s consistency is, in a way, a double-edged sword.
Shifting Footage is already essentially the most important Rush album, their most natural mix of ’70s-style prog virtuosity (instrumental monster “YYZ”) and ’80s new wave punch (hooky price-of-fame sing-along “Limelight”). The set’s Fortieth Anniversary Version would not change that verdict: With out an engineering diploma, 99 % of followers will not have the ability to detect a lot distinction within the new remaster — that’s, outdoors of the occasional element that will simply be a placebo impact. (Is Neil Peart’s triangle extra pronounced in the course of the intro of “YYZ,” swirling across the audio system? You be the decide.) In brief: It sounds good, similar to earlier than.
The Tremendous Deluxe Version is stacked with the requisite superficial goodies (in depth liner notes, lavish field, a number of audio codecs on Blu-ray) aimed on the nerdiest amongst us. However the crux of this bundle is a rattling, beforehand unreleased 1981 reside album, captured in Toronto and unfold throughout two discs. It captures an unvarnished, warts-and-all aesthetic, all jagged edges in distinction to the primary LP’s clean contours.
It is at all times fascinating to listen to Rush go ragged, with Lee straining to hit the excessive refrain of “Limelight” or the complete band failing to understand a stable tempo on the soft-to-soaring “Nearer to the Coronary heart.” And a number of other of those reside tracks are virtually punishing of their depth: Peart’s ringing toms in the course of the big-band jazz part of “La Villa Strangiato,” the dynamic shift into exhausting rock on “Pure Science,” the heavy reggae switch-up on “Working Man” amid the multi-track medley.
For die-hards starved for swag, this Fortieth-anniversary set is price investigating. However some could selfishly want Rush had been a bit sloppier again within the day — the band’s achieve in high quality was our (future) loss in amount.
Rush Albums Ranked
We look at Rush’s 19 studio albums, from 1974’s muscular self-titled launch to a sequence of exceptional late-career triumphs.
