So I swore off buying Rush albums in 1985 — but I fell off the wagon in 2004 when I read about this one. Because it seemed like an interesting turn.
Somewhere along the way, in the mid- to late-seventies, Rush stopped being just another band of Zep fans — as they'd begun — and became a byword for fearless originality. Undoubtedly after Neil Peart joined and started writing concept lyrics about the rebirth of music by an inspired individual in an age when creativity has been wiped from the history books… well, that might have had something to do with it.
So how refreshing that the band chose to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of their first album by going back and acknowledging their debt to the rock 'tradition'. You see, it's that compost thing again: recognising that everything that's new grows out of something old (that no longer smells nice).
And I got the gatefold vinyl edition, because it was there, because a lot of my Rush collection is on gatefold vinyl (1, 2, 3, 4), and because it was very reasonably priced at the time. I listened to it maybe two or three times before shelving it, thinking it was OK, but perhaps still a little too 'clean'.
This time I had once more come across the allmusic review of the album before I listened. Boy, is this reviewer keen! He concludes,
What the listener encounters is a Rush that has never ever been heard before: they indulge in the hero-worship and dream roots of the garage band that eventually became Rush, and they simultaneously search for the young garage band whose members never dreamed they'd be playing these tunes 30 years later as Rush. Anyone who thinks that there is no life left in the classics of the genre needs to hear this.
So I kept his perspective in mind when listening. Ahhh, you know, he's mostly right, but he over-eggs it a bit. Aside from anything else, Geddy's voice is much more rounded now, but I guess he'll never be able to do 'gnarly' very well; and some of these songs need gnarly. I enjoyed the songs whose originals I didn't know, Shapes of Things and Heart Full of Soul, which apparently was first done by the Yardbirds. I thought it was by Chris Isaak, but evidently I didn't read the credits on his album.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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