2112
History:
I’ve been scratching my head over this, I really have. I feel like I’ve owned this forever, so it must have been my first Rush album, yet I know it wasn’t. I know I owned it before ‘All The World’s A Stage’, because I remember getting that home and being disappointed by ‘2112’ being edited highlights. It wasn’t first, then, but it was close to it. A thousand years have passed me by since then, and although I have heard most of this relatively recently (I own a copy of ‘Different Stages’, remember, and I had two tracks from side 2 on my mp3 player months ago), I wonder if the original version still has the power to amaze? Because that’s what I really remember about this – being amazed by it; I was a big ELP fan as a teenager, and I wasn’t new to sprawling epics, and concept pieces (although I can’t honestly say that the lyrics of Pete Sinfield prepared me in any way for the Solar Federation) but I was blown away by this. Wonder if I still am?