Tag Archives: 2112

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 IV

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Thoughts from the future

Two things stand out – I absolutely love those videos, and the last line of my summary is a load of nonsense – the answer to that question is an awful lot of them, but I’m trying not to be too hard on myself; what I wrote then is what I thought then, I’m just older now…

Anyway, since then, I’ve listened to 2112 a whole bunch of times – my children gave me the 40th anniversary box set for Christmas a couple of years back, and while there’s not much new to be said about it (famously, Rush just don’t have unheard versions or leftover songs on the cutting room floor), it’s a magnificent thing in its own right, and well worth your hard-earned cash if you’re like me.

Which, given that you’re reading this, you probably are, at least a bit.

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 III

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A Passage to Bangkok

Yeah, I remember this.  Can I say straight off that the little ‘shorthand for being in Asia’ fill is about the cheesiest thing Rush ever recorded, but it still makes me smile.  Apart from that, I remember this well – one evening in Edinburgh, I was pub-crawling my way home and found myself in the Southern – not a pub I visited often, but it was known for having a decent rock jukebox.  I think I was looking for some Warren Zevon or something (I had a bit of a reputation in those days for putting odd things on jukeboxes), but I saw the word Rush.  Abandoning my beer goggles for a moment, I managed to focus enough to put it on.  It was this, a live version, and presumably the b-side to something; I don’t know what.  Whenever I heard it after that, I smiled to myself at the thought of the unsuspecting punters in the Southern being subjected to the Rush stoner’s anthem.

And that’s another thing – how long did it take me to work out what it was about?  I’m not saying, but I lived a sheltered life.

So, once you get chopsticks out of the way, what is there to say about this?  Not a huge amount, really – it’s the ideal light relief after the storms of side 1, and it’s just a simple riff and a pleasant melody.  Kind of sticks in the brain, though.  Just to reiterate that the production values are superb now – even something as light as this feels solid and crafted.

The Twilight Zone

A little descending figure, and we’re straight into it.  If (unlikely, I know, but work with me here) you were listening to this without knowing about the TV show, you’d be a little lost, I think.  I love the way we transition to the chorus – that fluid bass still gets me.  What’s interesting about it now is its gentleness – this is almost an acoustic number – at least until we get to the solos, and then there’s something I had never before noticed – the whispering!

I wish I’d been able to listen to all this stuff through crystal clear headphones when I was 20 – I’d have been in transports…

Lessons

I don’t remember this at all, and I’m not sure if it’s going to stick with me after this, either.  I detect the hand of a guitarist here – it’s a real guitarist’s song.  In a way, this feels like the last gasp of the old Rush – there’s a more basic, blues-based feel to this.  I have to say that it all fits together perfectly well, with the possible exception of the screeching of the  end of the chorus – not sure that’s entirely necessary, but it is what it is, I guess.  It has its moments, but not too many of them.

Tears

And so does this.  A little oasis of calm in the midst of all this, it has one of the great guitar intros – I can’t tell you how astonished I was one day to discover that it’s just a transposed C chord, and it’s another of those little figures that I play whenever I pick up a guitar – once you know it, you don’t forget it.

So, I can’t work out if this is all orchestrated, or if it’s just synth work – I suspect the latter, but it’s good enough to make me wonder.  In the end this is not what we think of when we think about Rush, is it?  It’s a  song which would have been perfectly acceptable if done by someone else, but just doesn’t quite seem to fit with the rest of what’s here.  Odd.

Something For Nothing

But this is much more like it!  Just listen to that bass – there’s so much going on in the introduction that I’m lost in the music when I’m suddenly assaulted by those so-familiar ‘Rush’ chords and swept up into the sheer enthusiasm of the thing, irresistibly so by the time the solo comes along.  So hard not to air guitar along…

I also still love the lyrics – how often do you hear this kind of philosophical sentiment expressed in a four-minute rock song? There’s even a full-blooded scream in the middle of all this pondering on the responsibilities of the individual in the modern society.

Ah, I love this band sometimes.

Summary

Well, it’s legendary.  That in itself is enough to make it difficult to talk about, and familiarity just adds to the difficulty.  But I’m hooked all over again.  I think I had forgotten that side 2 does have its weaker moments, but overall, this is a fine package.  It’s easy to see why things just took off from heere – here’s a mature band of excellent musicians, doing what they do so well.  It rewards careful listening, and how many 29-year old albums can you say that about?

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 II

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2112

Overture

Right, let’s get this out of the way first.  It’s absolutely not (in my view, of course) pretentious to use words or concepts like ‘Overture’ in rock music. I know I’m preaching to the converted here – at least, I hope I am – but this kind of thing can spoil perfectly good friendships, you know.

So we have an overture.  A proper one, just the way Mozart or Wagner would have done it – weaving in the themes from the whole work, and prefiguring the whole thing, while at the same time playing the oldest trick in the book – the one that modern-day pop song writers imagine they invented: letting us hear the melody of the chorus up front, so that when it comes around, it’s already familiar, and you are even more predisposed to liking it.  Just as Mozart previewed the big arias, so Rush here give us snippets of the big riffs and themes, softening us up for the main event.

When it starts, I’m immediately whisked back to my little room in Edinburgh.  It doesn’t matter how long it is since I heard this, I’m never going to mistake that synthesized swirl for anything else.  Immediately, I can see that all the lessons learnt over the last 3 albums have been put to work here; the arrangement is tight, the production awesome.  At times the bass leads the way, at others the guitar dances a jig; at all times it sounds like the mature Rush sound.  This is where it all falls into place.  I’ll even forgive the explosions.

Temples of Syrinx

A seamless segue from the cataclysmic end to the overture, and we’re straight into an anthem which is meant to sound like – well, an anthem.  Here’s the strident voice used to its proper effect – there’s no mistaking what’s going on here, and for all the joyful bounce of the melody, we’re under no illusions that this is a facade, and the manufactured happiness is just that – manufactured.  The lyrics deserve a mention here – sinister without there being anything you could put your finger on; I always loved “Oh, what a nice, contented world” – chilling in it’s naive simplicity.

As we move along, I’m struck by a Rush trademark, which I must have overlooked earlier – suddenly guitar and drums are the rhythm section, while the bass does its thing, and the sound created is unmistakable.  I’m strangely pleased at having put my finger on something I’d always taken for granted.

Discovery

Possibly the boldest thing they’ve tried so far; I have always loved this.  The spare, picked opening is utterly convincing (although it is a rare talent indeed who can pick up a guitar for the first time, and never hit a bum note) and if the development to harmonics and then structured melody is rather rapid, let’s not forget that this is a narrative device, not a literal guitar lesson.

The melody is still highly effective, and the sound is possibly unique in all of Rush music – is this the only track which features only guitar and voice?

Presentation

The crux of the whole thing; the pivotal moment, and it doesn’t disappoint.  The melody flows logically from the previous section, and the narrative voice blossoms from the earlier uncertainty to the strong, true sound – we can hear he has right on his side –

Which is why the contrasting voice (Father Brown; an odd resonance for me – I somehow doubt that G K Chesterton was high on Neil’s reading list, but you never know) is so devastating.  “Yes, we know; it’s nothing new” is possibly the single most crushingly dismissive line in all of recorded music.  So much so that the remainder of the song is a kind of anti-climax; just going through the required motions (which is what the characters in the story are doing) until we can reach the devastation of the breakdown, and the pained howl of the guitar solo.

Oracle: The Dream

(How many song titles have a colon in them?  Never mind.)

Putting aside for a moment my initial reaction (a male Oracle?); what strikes me about this is the way the vocal line leads the rhythmic pattern.  This is unusual for Rush, and it stands out for me; more usually, the voice serves the rhythm and is emphasized by it in return; this is odd, prompting me to wonder if it was composed differently to normal.  Or maybe I’m just hearing things.

Soliloquy

Sparsely orchestrated, here the music tells the tale just as well as the words.  This is ultimate despair, and the breakdown is complete – as the music boils over, so the voice is lost, becoming in its final agonies almost a caricature of the Priests’ voices – the irony, I am sure, is entirely intentional.  The abruptness of the end still seems a little shocking, but there are time constraints here, and we do understand that this was the only course which seemed open to him.  It’s just a little – sudden.

Grand Finale

If you’re going to have an Overture, you’d better have a Finale, and this is a beauty – satisfying the classical geek in me with its two competing themes, cleverly intertwined with the darting guitar solo.  If I have a quibble, it is that the ending is obscure, but then I realize that it may well be deliberately so; who wins this battle?  Just who has taken control, and of what?  You can read it both ways and the music doesn’t help, either.

I think that, as a younger man, I assumed that the good guys had won, that the Elder Race had come back to sort everything out.  Now, I’m older and more cynical, and I’m not so sure – my feeling is that the music tips us the other way, that the nascent revolution caused by this suicide has been brutally stamped on.

But I could be wrong.  What’s not to like here?  A song cycle, properly constructed, with themes and counterpoints, narrative tension and an unresolved ambiguous ending.  No wonder I like Mahler…

In the end, am I amazed?  No, not quite, but it’s still pretty damned good, and I am happy to have found new things in something which I knew so well.

Rediscovering Rush – 2112 I

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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?