379. Rush, "Moving Pictures"

 

Like many adolescents in the 80's filled with suburban ennui and a taste for sci-fi and fantasy, I had a Rush phase in my early teens, which involved a fair amount of listening to this record, arguably Rush's best or at least most accessible.  Their two biggest (and probably most radio-friendly) songs are both on here, "Tom Sawyer" and "Limelight."  

But don't take it from today TK, take it from TK's writing about this album in the school newspaper in nineteen-eighty-*cough*:  "'Tom Sawyer' was almost based on keyboards, with guitar secondary; their transition to techno-pop was almost complete.  Other cuts that proved notable included 'Limelight,' 'YYZ,' and instrumental named for the airport designation of Toronto, and 'Red Barchetta,' which survived zero airplay to become a sort of underground classic."  OK that's enough from you, young TK. No, I am not linking to this opus from my teen years.

Later on in the album things get much clunkier.  "The Camera Eye" has a too-long intro, and "Witch Hunt" is a proggy retelling of "The Crucible," weighted down with lyrics like "Features distorted in the flickering light/Faces are twisted and grotesque/Silent and stern in the sweltering night/Mob moves like demons possessed."  Here comes the tiny Stonehenge from the top of the stage.

After Rush, you could go in one of two ways.  I leaned into more straight rock stuff like the Replacements and Velvet Underground and R.E.M.  Some guys went proggier and got into King Crimson and Yes and early Genesis.  These guys are now astronomy professors who are into microdosing and the Dune novels.  Both were viable ways of proceeding after marinating in Geddy Lee's chipmunk vocals and Neil Peart's rococo drumming.  (By the way, Peart lived a life of almost unimaginable tragedy, losing both his daughter in a car crash and his wife to cancer within a year of each other, and finally succumbing to cancer himself.  Here's a great article about him in Rolling Stone; he's a fascinating guy.)