Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick and Roll
What do you who have heard the record think?
|
Long time no post. Howdy all.
Well, I've listened to it about fifteen times now. I'm posting this without having read any of this thread except KW's post.
Musically I like it a lot. It's less complicated than a lot of earlier stuff, but it's very "busy" with a lot of chops and actual singable melodies. It's actually pretty in places, and pretty is not a word I usually think of with Rush. Though it's not obvious, there are some passages with multiple time signatures overlapping, intricate passages that don't sound intricate... etc. I have a co-worker who doesn't like prog, but he played me a track by a band called "The Illustrated Band" that was in different time signatures. I mentioned prog and he said, "Yeah, but when Yes, Rush, and Crimson play in 11 it SOUNDS like it's in 11. I prefer it when you can't really tell that it's complicated. It's not showy then." He has a point, and this album does that. It's complicated but it doesn't SOUND complicated.
I like the liberal use of acoustics here too. Alex's guitar work is very strummy this time, without the weird solos of yesteryear. I do miss those weird solos, but hey, Vapor Trails had NO solos. Also the production is much better than that on Vapor Trails and Feedback.
With that said, I dislike this album intensely lyrically. It's extremely cynical, negative, and anti-religious, especially at Christianity. As a Baptist minister, that makes it hard for me to really get into. I just can't drive down the interstate singing along to "I don't have faith in faith. I don't believe in belief. You can call me faithless. But I still cling to hope, and I believe in love." If you know your Bible this is a reference to I Corinthians 13's famous "These three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love" passage. There are a lot more of these, such as the dig against shepherd who count their sheep (a common metaphor in Scripture for ministers is shepherd). There's also the line "we hold beliefs as a consolation"-to-get-us-through-the-day, which is Karl Marx-religion-is-the-opium-of-the-masses thinking. Neal has always been a New-Age syncretistic all-religions-are-the-same guy (see Totem), and this seems to be even dropped in favor of anti-religion. There's the two lines about "I've got my own moral compass to guide me" and the parallel line in the second verse of that song. This is moral relativism. He wants to build his morality on humanity, not the eternal God. There's many more, but in sum I just can't get into it lyrically, which will probably, once I tired of it musically, keep this one from being a common disc in my players.
I'm not necessarily trying to get into a debate on this issues (it's a prog forum, not a worldviews forum). I'm just saying from where I sit I'm ambivalent on the disc. There's my two cents.
Yesspaz out.