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RUSH

Permanent Waves ( reissue ,1980)

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7/10

The Canuck prog metallers’ breakthrough album, reissued. By John Lewis

OU can certainly see Y the appeal of Rush for a certain teenage rocker of the ’70s and ’80s. Here was a band who seemed to take all the hallmarks of prog rock – the technical proficiency, the slightly manic intensity, the fiddly time signatures, the switches in tempo, the bombastic fanfares, the poetic-sounding lyrics – and distil them into an easily digestible heavy metal format.

This process of distillation was helped by the fact that there were only three members. Neil Peart played like Gene Krupa in a metal band, thumping furiously around every square inch of his enormous kit but never forgetting his overriding duty to groove. Alex Lifeson switched between fiddly lead guitar lines and thrashy rhythm playing, and Geddy Lee played muscular basslines while singing in a faintly hysterical full-throated tenor yelp – Jon Anderson’s elfin tones taken into satanic territory. Even with Lee overdubbing the odd keyboard part, things were kept as stripped back and brutalist as prog metal can get. “I don’t know about numerology or anything mystical,” said Neil Peart, “but there’s something good about three people.”

Plenty of teenage metal fans – including the likes of Dave Grohl, Beck and Stephen Malkmus – thought they’d discovered the Holy Grail when they came across Rush’s 1976 LP 2112, a concept album based on the sci-fi novella Anthem by the bonkers right-wing libertarian Ayn Rand. But this 1980 release has held up much, much better, partly because you can hear them tentatively making links between prog and punk. Lead track “The Spirit Of Radio” – their only real UK hit – successfully squeezes Rush’s oeuvre into a five-minute piece of compressed power pop, with chiming guitars, a funky undertow and even a reggae diversion. It’s not a million miles away from what The Police were doing at the time, and you can even hear Lifeson playing the kind of hands-free sustained guitar arpeggios that we associate with Andy Summers or The Edge.

“Freewill” is another tight, punky track that grooves far more effectively than any song in the arcane time signature of 13/4 has any right to do. “” Peart’s” It initially suggests the influence of Rand’s rational libertarianism but seems to be more of a defiant hymn to muscular secularism – more Christopher Hitchens than Ayn Rand.