If Atlantic is willing to dish out some payola (I haven't heard anything on the radio yet, but this album is still headlining the Atlantic web site), Rush will be well-received by fans of modern rock and U2. But the folks who will be most pleased with Vapor Trails, Rush's first studio album in six years, are classic Rush fans. I'm talking about the fans who dig their late-70s heavy, progressive era that started with 2112 and ended with Moving Pictures before they started getting synthesizer-heavy.
Vapor Trails is probably Rush's heaviest album to date. It most strikingly features Alex Lifeson embracing a minimalist, speed-guitar style most popularly utilized by U2's The Edge. I hear U2 all over this album! Some songs like "Ghost Rider" even seem to turn over the lead guitar role to Geddy Lee's bass and leave the key to Lifeson's strumming. "Peaceable Kingdom" likewise lets Lee's bass roll all over as Neil Peart sets the tempo. Lifeson even throws a short Cake-like groove in at one point in the song.
Peart is still one of the most brilliant lyricists in music, and the tragic death of his wife and daughter several years ago seems to have inspired parts of this album. In "Secret Touch," he writes:
You can never break the chain
There is never love without pain
A gentle hand, a secret touch on the heart.
He gives us more exceptional poetry in "Ceiling Unlimited":
The slackjaw gaze of true profanity feels more like surrender than defeat
If culture is the curse of the thinking class
If culture is the curse of the thinking class
Ceiling unlimited
World so wide
Turn and turn again
Feeling unlimited
Still unsatisfied
Changes never end.
Musically, "Ceiling Unlimited" is one of several songs ("Freeze" is another) that would have fit very well as heavy anchors on an album like Permanent Waves. "The Stars Look Down" is a bit more subdued, leading with driving verses, then relaxing into a treble-heavy chorus speckled with sharply struck high notes declining in scales that actually conjure images of stars twinkling and falling.
"How It Is" sounds very Roger McGuinn. I'm not knocking McGuinn, but this song seems a bit more likely than recent Rush albums and doesn't fit too well on this one. I also wasn't too impressed with the opening track and first single, "One Little Victory," which is pointlessly noisy and offers little besides a catchy bass groove. This is especially disappointing because Rush is one of the few bands whose management usually picks the best songs to promote. (As a prominent counterexample, take Sixpence None the Richer's big hit, "Love," which was probably the worst song on their self-titled album.)
But the album ends on a high note with "Out of the Cradle":
It's a dream for the waking
It's a flower touched by flame
It's a gift for the giving
It's a power with a hundred names.
It's a lyrical theme we've heard before. (Think "New World Man" as just one example.) They're using it again because it works, and this time they're pulling it off at "The Spirit of Radio" speed.
Surge of energy, spark of inspiration
The breath of love is electricity
Maybe Time is a bird in flight
Endlessly mocking
Here we come out of the cradle
Endlessly rocking
Endlessly rocking.
Endlessly rocking is RIGHT!
4.5 tocks
Similar sounding releases
2002Poor Old LuThe Waiting Room
2003The Prayer ChainHere Comes the Rust
1995Love ComaLanguage of Fools
2002Midnight OilCapricornia
1997TreeOverflow
2000Chris TaylorWorthless Pursuit of Things On the Earth
