Progressive rock is a subgenre of Rock n Roll. This genre typically combines various other genre elements such jazz, blues, funk and many others. This is one of the most artistically playful genre with a great variety of instruments and unexpected twists in music.
This genre rose in 1960s with the whole psychedelic movement evolvement. Progressive rock became prominent and established its post in 1970s. There were many bands who was playing and experimenting with this genre and few made it to the mainstream breaking free out of underground, one of them is the mighty Rush. This band is one of those pioneers of progressive rock that paved the way for others later on, for the bands like Dream Theater, Fates Warning and others.
The 40th anniversary of the “Moving pictures” album by Rush is the best time to celebrate the immense creativity of this classic progressive rock band.
The start of the career
Rush is trio Canadian band from Toronto. The former member of this band was Alex Lifeson on guitar, John Rutsey on drums, Jeff Jones on bass and vocals. The powerhouse line up begins with the latter vocal and bassist Geddy Lee and Neil Peart on dums and percussion. They band had carried on in this way until the death of Neil Peart on January 7, 2020.
They reached their first commercial success with the album ‘Fly by night’. An amazing classic Rush when these boys just got started. Their whole transition was quite noticeable in this album in comparison to their first debut self-titled album, both musically and lyrically.
The follow up album named ‘Caress of steel’in 1975 was equally a heavy concept driven album with a complex arrangement and long epic songs with stories and adventures to the Rush fantasy land.
The next successes of Rush
With the release of ‘2112’ in 1976 Rush made a huge breakthrough. This became a milestone album for their huge success all over the world. The whole album has a quite noticeable turn from their previous albums. This album was a by-product of their confused state with their previous two albums, where they received poor audience review due to their lengthy complex song arrangement.
With this album they made it past any confused state they had been in and still kept the lengthy track, but this time with heavy arrangements and people dug it so well.
They continued releasing kickass materials followed by the ‘2112’ and their musical style kind of remained the same as of their previous albums until 1980 with the release of ‘Permanent Waves’. The whole sound took a new face and shape as well as their song arrangement, shortening it than their previous albums. On 1981 they released ‘Moving Pictures’ which marks the most influential album in the history of music.
“Moving Pictures”
Regular listeners to die-hard Rush fanatics all can spend days on this single album due to its rich song arrangements, lyrical contents, theme, sound, overall this is the album where you put a 5 star without a hesitation.
‘Moving pictures’ gave these boys a new horizon a complete commercial success with over 5 millions copy sold and still remains their highest selling album of all time.
Afterwards, they moved in to a new modern sounding atmosphere with fantastic synth works and fancy lyrical concepts. The next noticeable change in their sound begins from the album ‘Roll the bones’. They begun to sound more like alternative.
The world of Rush is a whole new world of musical variations and it is worth to spend time on their discography. Undoubtedly, Rush is one of the most influential bands of all time.