PRESTO

I felt I needed to review this album, even though I never owned it and have not heard it since probably 1990 or so. The reason being that the year it was released was also the year I "discovered" Rush (by that I mean, actually realized what a great band they were.........I had been hearing their popular hits on the radio for years before this of course). In fact, this was the year I first came to prog rock in general in a big way (I had been into Floyd for a few years, but never realized they were considered a prog band and was not even aware of the fact there was a genre called prog). I was mostly focused on the album 2112, but also was getting into the early 80's material as well. So when my friends and I heard "Show don't Tell", it was something of a revelation to us. It seemed like Rush was returning to their prog glory days. Of course, when we finally listened to the whole album we realized that this was not really the case. But the album was still good, and to my ears at the time far better than the previous 4. Since this was also the only tour I saw Rush on (2 shows), it has some sentimental value for me. In fact, the first of the two shows, we got to see Neil make a mistake(!) on the song Superconductor, after which he proceded to play a completely different drum part for the rest of the song that was amazing and made the song far better than the studio version. Alas I never saw anything like that again from him, just his usual precision, but it gave a hint to just what this band could have done had they taken a different approach to live performance of their songs (i.e. not just playing the songs as note perfect recreations of the studio albums). So a decent album if you are a Rush fan, but certainly not a good place for a progger to start with the band.