Rush grace under pressure7/30/2023 ![]() The follow-up track, “Afterimage,” will flat-out shock listeners as it crashes through with a sense of strength and power that Rush has never shown before (here, each and every member of the band sounds ANGRY – and it carries over into their performances as they seem to punch through harder and more urgently) which sets up “Red Sector A” as a bit of a breather before the band assaults listeners again with the epic “The Enemy Within.” It’s big, it’s huge and unquestionably rock-y, but also very urbane and delicate lines like “You sometimes drive me crazy/ But I worry about you” sum up the dichotomy of the poles that Rush is balancing upon here, and it’s very easy to enjoy the balance because, while it may seem like it SHOULD be precarious, it’s rock-solid and steady.Īfter “Distant Early Warning” sets the precedent for how Grace Under Pressure functions, listeners will find they have no trouble traversing the A-side of this vinyl reissue. Here, Alex Lifeson seems to bounce his chorus pedal-infused guitar off of that wall, while Neil Peart’s polyrhythmic drumming drives spikes into it in order to let Geddy Lee’s bass get a higher vantage point in the mix and leap over everything else. The song opens boldly, but the first surprise comes courtesy of the wall of synths which hits listeners first, and how clean and sparkling it is. That discipline is absolute in that none of these tracks treads over the “FM radio approved” five-minute song limit at any point (the longest song is “Between The Wheels,” which clocks in at 5:44), while still managing to keep the obvious progressive rock elements so key to the band’s sound and persona in place.Įven now, decades after it was originally released, both fans and the unfamiliar alike will be struck by “Distant Early Warning” as it opens the album and shatters both expectations and the things that fans thought they knew about Rush. Presumably, it is for that reason Rush elected to both combine the angles of the music they’d already made as well as pushing the possibilities of that combination to its extreme for their tenth album simply said, what listeners got on Grace Under Pressure was an expression of Rush not only balancing their prog and pop sensibilities, but having the discipline to present both equally in each of the album’s eight songs. Even so, they had to have known they could go further, even as Signals hit new release racks at record stores. The success of that change was truly dynamic as the introduction of synths added new dimensions to the band’s compositional style, and the more abbreviated engineering of Sirens illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that everyone in the band was interested in serving the songs they were writing and not just gunning for a bigger, bolder solo. In this case, fans already knew that Rush had been the greatest and best-kept secret in rock n’ roll for years, and had proven that they were brave enough to approach their music from new angles when they released Moving Pictures in 1981. Perhaps the most important thing that Rush proved when they released Grace Under Pressure is that (to paraphrase what George Orwell wrote in 1984) the best albums are those which reiterate those things of which people were already aware.
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