At the time I had Rush written off as one of those annoying metal bands from across the Atlantic, loved by people whose hair was longer than my mum would let me grow mine. Certainly they were mentioned in that company, and for a long time I assumed they weren't for me.
Then I started hearing them referred to as a prog group and questioned my previous thinking, ending up with committing the unthinkable sin of buying a Rush CD when I saw it in a charity shop.
My quest, to answer the age old question - Rush - metal or prog?
Opening song A Farewell To Kings begins with a very Steve Hackett-like acoustic guitar intro, with a medieval feel, before the whole band comes in, and it's a curious mix of the convoluted time signatures you find in prog, the guitar solos from metal, and Geddy Lee has one of the most metal timbres to his voice I've ever heard. And those lyrics - the most clichéd 'glory days of yore' lyrics from both genres. Yet I quite like it.
Xanadu, a longer track, follows with an ambient style opening over a backdrop redolent of distant thunder and horses' hooves before the main theme kicks in, a solid rock number, and a decent listen, as overblown and pretentious as any prog number, but it holds the attention. Closer To The Heart is shorter, and much more commercial and catchy, while Cinderella Man tries more of a narrative style, with limited success, the instrumental breaks being far more interesting than the lyrics.
Madrigal slips by, non-descript and mercifully short, before the final long piece Cygnus X-1, an industrial intro, followed by a relentless theme, before the space nonsense lyrics kick in with the Geddy Lee metal shriek.
And for me, he's the problem with Rush. I find his voice just too much of a hackneyed heavy metal theme, and the lyrics here are sub-Sixth Form drivel. Yet I can't help quite liking this album, for all that. Prog or metal? I'm still none the wiser.
3* - enough here to make it interesting, if you can ignore the vocals and lyrics.
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