Brought To You By The Letter...

I know that the best days of my favorite band are behind them - that there will probably never be another great Rush album. For the record, I am of the opinion that the last great Rush album was Presto, from way back in 1989, although all of the albums since have been fine. They just haven't been great. Actually, I thought Counterparts was pretty great, too, but if you're really going to be honest, it doesn't hold a candle to Presto. And if you need some evidence, take Presto for a spin and pay particular attention to "Superconductor," one of the most musically complex songs you will ever hear in popular rock and roll. Rush has always been known for packing a lot of changes into their songs, but "Superconductor" is like a festival of key changes. "Available Light" really showcases Geddy Lee's vocal range, and "The Pass" is one of their most lyrically intense songs.

The new record is called Snakes & Arrows, and it's a good one, though not nearly as good as its predecessor, 2002's Vapor Trails. This new one starts out slowly - the first few songs have heavy lead guitar chord progressions and almost get you thinking that this will be another album in wihch Alex is hidden behind the formidable rhythm section - but if you survive the sometimes poor mixing (there are some sloppy changes in both "Far Cry" and "Armor And Sword" where the mix drops quite noticeably in tone quality) and make it to the first of three instrumental songs, "The Main Monkey Business," your patience will be rewarded.

The song after that first instrumenal is called "The Way The Wind Blows," and it is the first one that makes you sit up and pay attention to the lyrics (although the mix is crappy here, too, suppressing Geddy's vocals), and it starts out with some nice guitar licks that might make you think of a particular Pink Floyd song (I'll leave it open here to see if anyone else hears the same Floyd tune that I did - let me know). There’s a classic Lifeson guitar solo in the middle, too, and the lyrics are good - a song that tries to make sense of the way of the world, with the speaker resigning himself to going with the flow, even though it looks like the flow is going to sweep us all away.

And it only gets better from there. "Hope" is an Alex Lifeson solo that has a Southern kind of sound, and though it is very short, it is also very striking. "Faithless" is an acoustic-driven number in the vein of "Resist," from Test For Echo, and it might very well wind up taking that song's place in the tour set list. On the R30 tour, Geddy and Alex played "Resist" and "Heart Full Of Soul," from the cover EP Feedback, by themselves while Neil took a break after his drum solo. Hopefully I will get to find that out this summer - Rush plays Deer Creek on Sunday, August 26th, but I suspect Amy will want to stay home with little Jackson, so I'm not sure who I would go with.

“Malginant Narcissism” is an instrumental, too, one that echoes some of the musical things they did in “YYZ,” from Moving Pictures, way back in 1981 - including a couple of little bass licks that show Geddy getting melodic again, something that he used to do regularly but doesn’t much anymore in the songs. (Going back for a second listen, there are some melodic bass parts in the first track, “Far Cry,” which I did not pick up on the first time.)

Overall, the record is pretty good, although age is taking its toll on these three fine musicians. Age, however, has not taken its toll on their sense of humor. Continuing with a tradition that started around the time of Power Windows, their best album, they close the liner notes on this new album with the following:

Brought to you by the letter "sssss"