VAPOR TRAILS

I too was looking forward to this release. Like most Rush albums, I knew to give it time to grow on me ~ and it did. I agree with many who state this not a GREAT album nor anything close to what we've come to expect over the decades. Yet, there are gems in there and I would leave it up to individual tastes to assess which tracks constitute GEMS for you... Having said all this the fact still remains, someone majorly dropped the ball in the the production phase of this album. I've read and heard in interviews that the approach on Vapor Trails was to get back to the raw performance, less manipulated form of production. What bothers me to this day is the rather overmodulated, saturated sound of many of the tracks on this CD. You don't hear it referred to much these days, but the industry desriptor for what plagues this album is called ~ sibilance ~ and unfortunately some of the albums most noteable tracks suffer from it. Sibilance was a common phenomenon in the early days of high fidelity rock and roll recordings ~ even in the eighties to some extent. But Rush was always known to have some, if not most, of THE cleanist recording practices around ~ which made for very exceptional productions on both vinyl and CD. If you listen closely to this album take note of how much sibilance (scratchy, hissing distortion) you can hear on top of the music. Not only does this distortion characteristic plague the guitar sound but vocals as well. This is indicative of a final mix down processing problem. Another characteristic missing on this release is the simple dynamic range. The distorted top end (louder passages) of this album are too close to the quiet low end. You can always tell a failed recording by amount of gain response to turning up the volume control ~ and as many have pointed out ~ as you turn up this CD, the harder it is to listen to. Lack of dynamic range IMHO ~ it destroys this albums ability to SHINE through. If the final mix was THE intended results ~ the experiment failed. If not, Atlantic Records (with motivation from Rush) should at a minimum re-release this CD in a cleaned up state. Throughout this blog you'll see descriptions of the "washed out", "muddied" and down right crappy sound quality. These are accurate depictions of the Rush tragedy captured on disc...

What a shame

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