31 posts tagged “rush”
A mysterious package arrived at my home today. When I opened it up, it was the free copy of the Snakes & Arrows DVD version that Musictoday promised me after I had to deal with their awful concert ticket purchasing site. I hadn’t heard anything about it in over a month, and this version came out back on June 5, so I’d just assumed that they never sent it. But there it was. I guess I shouldn’t complain about getting my free stuff late.
The app you use to browse the contents of the disc is industrial waste. It took long enough to launch that I was worried it would never fully open. Of course, it has an interface reminiscent of the mid-90’s “Enhanced CDs” that were supposed to change the way we experience music, but instead just made us embarrassed that someone obviously spent lot of time and energy to make something so unimpressive. The performance was bad enough to make my one-year-old MacBook stutter the video more than once per second.
And, as a final stab, the “create your own ringtone” feature as advertised on the package:

- It is, for some reason, a separate Flash app.
- It makes you scroll through a list of hundreds of cell phone models to find yours.
- Once you choose a phone and a song, it gives you this completely fake waveform graphic for finding the segment of the song you want.
- Once you have chosen your song segment, you are expected to click the BUY MY RINGTONE button. Isn’t it grand that if you pay the extra money to get the awesome, ultimate version of an album, you are blessed with the opportunity to pay for the music again in another form? Thankfully I know how to open Bluetooth File Exchange and move an mp3 file I already own onto my phone for free.
This would all bother me a lot more, but! Someone smart made it so that, if you dig around the folders on the disc, you can get at all of the content without launching the awful custom interface. All of the photos, desktops, icons, music, and videos are sitting there as sensible files you can drop onto the apps of your choice. That common-sense feature makes it all worthwhile.
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.)
When I was first realizing who Rush was, because of my brother’s obsession with them, this was the newest Rush album. I can still remember, when I was 10 years old, my brother quizzing me: “Hey Billy, why are we here?”
I’d respond, “Why?”
“Because we’re here; roll the bones~”
For a while, after years of enjoying it, I got it into my head that this was a sub-par Rush album. Probably because of another National Midnight Star post. I reclaimed it a few years back, partially because it’s one of the Rush albums my fiancée doesn’t mind listening to. (A Farewell to Kings or Hemispheres, on the other hand…)
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.
