29 posts tagged “marseditbeta”
My first listen of this album ended up being in the bathtub. I had just a bit of spare time left in my day, and I still hadn’t gotten in the bath, so I brought the iPod with me. When I listen to a new album from musicians I have a history with, I get the atmosphere of the album pretty well, but the songs usually sound homogenous and flat and kind of jumbled together, so that I can’t tell any two of them apart. This album sounds dire and forlorn, with a kind of haunted suggestion that, well,
We can only grow the way the wind blows
On a bare and weathered shore
We can only bow to the here and now
In our elemental war
It only took a couple of listens before the individual songs’ personalities came into focus for me, and I was singing them to myself. Lines that at first seemed flat or clichéd ended up hovering in my mind as subtly powerful images. This sounds unduly dramatic, but it really feels like I have a new way to look at the world, now. My cousin Steve and I often quote relevant Rush lyrics to each other at significant moments, somewhat in the way that Christians recite Bible verses. So, in some small way, it’s like book number 18 was just added to our Bible. Of course, this is a darkly appropriate metaphor, considering how bitterly this whole album treats religious faith.
This is the Rush album that I most strongly associate with a certain time in my life: it came out while I was living in Tokyo. I actually picked it up a couple of days before the official release date; Japan doesn’t seem to care too much for release dates when it comes to imported CDs. I picked it up at Tower Records in Shinjuku, carried it back to my friend’s apartment in Nakano, and put it on his stereo system. I remember the feeling I got then, the feeling I still get whenever I put on a brand new album by any artist I care very much about, that it wasn’t nearly good enough. I worried to myself, oh no, could they have finally lost it?
Of course, within a few days I was convinced that it was the best thing they had ever recorded. I listened to it on my MD player every day as I walked 20 minutes from my house to the local train station, on the train into the city, transferring to the Yamanote line at Gotanda, transferring to the Chûo line at Yoyogi, and walking 20 minutes to my university campus.
When I hear the lyrics from “Ceiling Unlimited”,
It’s not the heat, it’s the inhumanity
Plugged into the sweat of a summer street
Machine gun images pass
Like malice through the looking glass
I’ll always think of crossing the big intersection by Yotsuya station with my headphones on. This whole album conjures up such images of walking around Tokyo in the summer.
I always thought, though, that listening to this album was somehow stressful, somehow tiring. As it turns out, pretty much everyone including the band agrees that the recording is hopelessly distorted, damaged, awful. For some people, it’s unlistenable. For me, I still love it, but it’s tragic that such brilliant songs were so polluted.
This album came out when I was in high school. I was driving by then, so I could hurry to the Best Buy near 135th and Cicero right after class and pick it up on the release day. It was great to buy the CD and immediately stick it in the CD player of my Mom’s silver Ford Escort; that’s something I can’t do anymore now that I have a car with a cassette deck for hooking up the iPod. The CD stayed in that car for a very, very long time, spending lots of time in the “Now Playing” display I installed on the dashboard.
When I started my summer job downtown, my brother-in-law and his coworkers put on this album quite often. The music-aficionado/software-engineer Goodwill was astonished that Rush was the favorite band of someone as young as me.
Listening should push Rush to to #3 in my play count charts at last.fm, beating out Yaida Hitomi and Pizzicato Five. Of course, if I had last.fm data going back to 1993, Rush would be #1.
This was the first Rush album to come out after I started caring about Rush. Somehow, maybe through the National Midnight Star e-mail list, I found out that they were going to be premeiring the title track on one of the local rock radio stations. I taped it, and listened to it over and over on the bus to school each day. Because of that tape, to this day whenever I listen to the album I half expect “Test For Echo” to lead straight into “Amazing” by Aerosmith.
After school on the release day, I rushed to Threshold, the local record store in Orland Park, Illinois, and picking up two copies: one for me and one for my brother Joe who was in Germany.
Whenever I listen to “Totem”, I remember it as the song I was singing along with in my car when some guys pulled up next to me, started harassing me, and ended up punching me in the face and driving off. It probably didn’t have that much to do with the song, but now I’m a lot more careful about singing along while stopped at red lights.
This was the Rush album that had just come out when I started caring very much about Rush. I still remember being in Texas to visit my sister, and picking it up at the mall, as probably my third or fourth CD ever. The lyrics are some of Neil Peart’s best; stuff like this, that I never would have found were it not for my older siblings, probably contributed a lot to my weird intellectualism while growing up. The liner notes are, I think, the most elaborate of any Rush album, with numerous photographs and lists exhibiting counterparts of all kinds.
I associate this album with my cousin Steve, who has been my cognitive companion for my whole life, and who at some point made Rush as much a part of his life as I had. (We had a similar co-discovery of Pearl Jam.)
I kind of fell off my ritual, there… I assure you it has nothing to do with illegitimate copies of the new Rush album circulating on the webs! >:O
Presto is probably my favorite album, by anyone, of all time. Also, probably the Rush album it took me the longest to get into. I still remember the first time I tried listening to it, for some reason. It was in the basement, outside my brother’s room, on one of the disregarded old armchairs down there, on my beyond-cheapy GPX portable CD player that I got for Christmas. I remember not thinking very much of it at all.
The next time I really paid attention to it was on some trip with my family; we were staying in a hotel somewhere, and I spent the evening in the lobby reading Dune and listening to Presto. That time it really made contact with my brain just right, and I’ve treasured it ever since.
That so many people overlook this album, and that even the band themselves rarely play anything from it in concert, probably help my personal attachment to it, like it’s a masterpiece just for me.
This is my least listened-to Rush album. I’m not really sure why. At some point I think I got the idea in my head that it didn’t sound that good, and it probably came from a National Midnight Star post made many years ago.
Listening to it again now, it’s actually pretty energetic and excellent. I have caught the CEO of the company I work for listening to it on more than one occasion, and that should have been enough reason for me to give it another chance. It's also got one of my favorite Rush logos ever, up there with Signals.
I kind of miss this kind of recording, where weird synthesized noises accentuate each song, songs have intros and outros, and everything is all polished up to perfection. The promise of some mini-instrumentals gives me some hope for such an atmosphere on the new album.
I once proposed “Time Stand Still” as the theme song for a Christian youth retreat thingy I was on in high school. In retrospect, I should have kept my good musical taste to myself. They ended up settling on some Sheryl Crow song; they wouldn’t know a kick-ass Christian youth retreat theme song if it poked them in the tear ducts.
I tend to group these past three albums together as a kind of trilogy. Signals introduces the new, anti-Terry-Brown Rush sound and examines modern man, Grace Under Pressure brings it to a stark, grim territory, and then Power Windows brings it to big, epic topics. The song “Grand Designs” pretty well sums up the atmosphere of this album. So many of the songs are about huge concepts that motivate humanity: money, war, nationalism, nature, dreams, and so on.
Yesterday at the fancy Italian restaurant, a lady came up to me and said that she noticed the little Rush pin on my jacket. She asked if I was going to see them during this tour, and we talked a moment about how eagerly we were looking forward to the new album. It always makes my day to meet a fellow Rush fan. :D
This is probably the best Rush album cover. Hugh Syme has been working with Rush to design their album art since Caress of Steel in 1975.
Man, is this album bleak. I think this is the darkest Rush album, which rarely occurs to me because the cover is white and blue. I can’t separate the sound of the songs from the look of the package.
The high point for me is Alex’s crazy little mini-solo in “Kid Gloves”.
