Rush - 8 Years After VAPOR TRAILS

PREFACE: I have to write about Rush eventually; that is just par for my course. While many friends, readers and enemies may and do mock me for my addiction, I will stand firm in supporting the band because they have influenced me as both an artist and a thinker. As I am short on time, this week's post will be a review I wrote in 2002 when Rush released Vapor Trails, one of their finer albums. I am posting this because I think it is decent writing and also because I was kind of ticked that it never got published. Breaking into the music review business is tough business.

REVIEW OF Vapor Trails by Rush; originally written in 2002:

If your musical tastes draw you toward the latest hit-rap, hip-hop, flip-pop or sap-top, then perhaps Rush isn’t (and never has been) for you.

But if your maturing, yes even reaching middle age, intellect feeds on a more introspective sound, then perhaps the Canadian trio is (and always has been) just what you’re looking for.

With the release of Vapor Trails, their 17th studio album, Rush not only launches into a new chapter of their musical odyssey, but they simultaneously sculpt a finer image of their unique style — an eclectic blend of rock and melody which heightens the spirit and awakens the conscious to newly formed realities.

For as much as Rush is a rock and roll band, they are musicians first, and as musicians they have challenged themselves artistically and conceptually with each of their previous sixteen endeavors. Vapor Trails is no exception.

From the opening riffs of the single “One Little Victory” the middle-aged rockers seem to be toying with us, reinforcing their ability to grasp every genre of rock with a drum and guitar escalade that would impress even the hardest Korn fan. In fact, they seem to be showing off, portraying a “Listen to what we can play” expression of virtuosity. You want hard and fast, well how about hard, fast and intricately complex?

Layered with hearty cords and resounding percussion, the rhythm straight out rocks, a ripping tirade that has become a signature of the band’s talents. The song, however, drifts with a comfortable transition into an ethereal, sensitive tune one tends to expect as quintessentially Rush, then pounds back and forth between the two alternating styles to encompass the sense of accomplishment felt when one experiences “Just one little victory...the spirit breaking free...”

Geddy Lee’s voice has aged like wine — now lilting and praiseworthy rather than screeching and powerful as it was fifteen years ago. Alex Lifeson’s guitar work has taken art and craft to a level of sophisticated trade, a “Blacksmith and Artist,” to borrow a phrase from the Rush anthology. And Neil Peart, well, Peart as lyricist and drummer is precise and rhythmic on percussion, worldly and in-tuned on lyrics, as always.

If the introduction to the band’s return after a six year hiatus does its job by pulling the rock audience in, the album does not disappoint.

The second track, the inspired and lively “Ceiling Unlimited,” pulsates with energy and direction, supporting the thoughtful lyrics under a shell of sense and vibration. It previews the entire record, a veritable journey which sends the “culture of the thinking class” on a mission through near-anthemic songs with heart and determination at every beat. After all, with their return, “The time is now again.”

The haunting and mystical “Ghost Rider” tells a tale of exploration around the world’s majesty, based on Peart’s own experiences as recounted in a memoir of the same title, and perhaps confronting the personal demons he faced while mourning the death of both his wife and daughter in separate events between 1997 and 1998.

Likewise, the album's title track leaves one envisioning all the places we have been and need to go in a world falling away with chaos while attempting to redefine ourselves as a shared human race.

Tenderly, “And the Stars Look Down” and “Secret Touch” find ways to exhibit emotionality while being backed by a heavy thud and thunderous rock sound. At moments the album lingers between hope — with the inspiring “Sweet Miracle,” which utilizes the “Rushian” (to coin a term) technique of double meaning layered like a Chekhov play with subtext and suggestion — and lost despair in “Freeze,” a darkened, driving exploration of the human psyche confronted with fear.

One cannot critique a Rush effort without focusing on the lyrical quality of the piece, for it is there that the soul of the band exists and where Rush separates themselves from other bands — namely the countless, both famous and forgotten, other bands who have come, gone and come back and gone away again in the twenty-five plus years since we first heard the Rush sound.

While Vapor Trails is not the “Tom Sawyer” or “Free Will” of mass appeal from the group’s halcyon days, it is an album whose conscious is vital and profound, free spirited and as wise as Sawyer may have hoped to become. It is, perhaps, Tom Sawyer all grown up.

Vapor Trails as a piece of literature endears itself poetically to a substance within that conscious, a thinking man’s creed, to pardon the pun. The album is over-layed with innuendo and insight both reflective and contemplative.

From the mundane yet omnipotently practical, “That’s how it is, that’s how it’s going to be,” to the hopeful, “Dream of a peaceable kingdom, dream of a time without war,” the work echoes of a band comfortable with the wisdom of age and sincere in their concern for humanity. As well, it underlines a conviction in their belief, if the line “It’s a smile on the edge of sadness/ It’s a dance on the edge of life” is to be believed in a better means of existence, a hope for conscious.

As he has in the past, Peart investigates those things which make us human and develops the ideas which teach us to consider how we understand the world around us: “What is the meaning of this? / What are you trying to say? / Was it something I said? Something you’d like me to do? / And the stars look down...” In the end, he grants us the peace of mind to age, but to do so while still kicking butt.

The flaw in the album may exist in its failure to produce a single track which jumps off the CD as a classic radio play mainstay. That never has been the concept Rush has gone for, and other tracks, “Earthshine” and “Nocturne,” support a complete work driven to redefine the band as rock musicians. The final track, “Out of the Cradle” signs off with a cryptic message, “Here we come, out of the cradle, endlessly rocking, endlessly rocking,” suggesting perhaps their resolve to continue with their passion for rock and roll as long as they are able to pound out boastful melodies and intense music.

Vapor Trails may not find its way onto the Billboard Top 40, as few Rush releases have, but it remains musically a tricky and elusive investigation of sound. Still, like their other works, it will sell its gold-standard to a devoted following and will place itself proudly within the band’s anthology as a spiritual, esoteric piece of musical art which exists not for, but because of, its conscious.