Rush - Moving Pictures
(Mercury, 1981)

Silently and swiftly moving their round peg into the square hole, Rush put forth this treasure of an album, Moving Pictures. Everything on this record shines with passion and beauty; an elegantly perfect release from a trio of brilliant musicians. Truly amazing in execution and production, all seven tracks are listenable all the way through, and one can grasp different nuances with each successive play.

Dropping the usual concept-oriented approach, Rush's focus on each individual song improves the overall quality of the music, and thus gives birth to this magnum opus of a record. Geddy Lee's obsession with the synthesizer would in due time ruin their credibility, but on this release it nicely complements the rest of the band, adding a soft luminescence rather than a dominant lead.

The record explodes onto the scene with the percussion-dominated Tom Sawyer, proving Neil Peart to be the most technically proficient rock drummer of the time. Red Barchetta excellently tumbles along a potent guitar groove, with Geddy Lee's shrieking vocals in full effect. Rush's signature song, Limelight, opens up with a classic guitar riff, then gracefully weaves through a masterful mesh of sonorous rock, Alex Lifeson's guitar woven into the music effortlessly and beautifully. The instrumental, YYZ, kicks off with a tortured dischorded pounding before switching gear into an excellent metallic funk. The list goes on, with each song excellently emphasizing Rush's spectacular affinity for songwriting, making each composition so unbelievably deep. With Moving Pictures, you could tell Rush were striving for their masterwork here; they knew what they were doing. It is clearly not just the masterwork of their career, Moving Pictures is the masterwork of the early eighties, and one of the great hard rock records of all time.

Rating: 5/5