SUBDIVISIONS (RUSH)

Don't buy this album. Don't even look at it. Try to avoid stores that carry it so that you don't pick it up by mistake like I did. When I stumbled across this the day it came out and took a gander at the back of the case, I can't deny the great excitement I felt. Hey I like Sebastian Bach, I like Vinnie Moore, I like Alex Skolnick, I like Rush. What could go wrong? Then taking a glance at the track times I noticed how they were usually a full minute longer than Rush's version. Wow I thought, they must really revamp these songs and make them their own. Wrong, boy was I wrong.

I remember I started playing "Limelight" because I had recently been on Caress Of Steel and Grace Under Pressure listening binges and was afraid of "Distant Early Warning" and "Lakeside Park" loosing their kick. For the first minute of the song I had no idea what was going on. The band decided to write their own song with some annoying hair metal guitar and keyboard riff and tack it onto the beginning of "Limelight." Then when the song finally enters I'm met with Kip Winger singing like he is in fact in Winger and almost immediately I'm hit by a guitar solo. What's going on? I stomach through the song filled with annoying little meaningless alterations, and for some reason another terrible guitar solo in that atrocious, emotionless, cliché tone that should have been outlawed, to get to the part where Alex's phenomenal solo should be. There is a guitar solo, certainly not Alex's, acting as an intro to the reprise of the alien, unrelated song tacked on at the beginning of the track. After they noodle on in nonsense with that for awhile they return to "Limelight" and Andrea Kisser throws out the seminal solo of Alex's for his own which could have been lifted from any album of Motley Crue, Poison, or Skid Row, take your pick. Then the song closes with, another guitar solo. The extra minute and a half can be accounted for by a completely unrelated song tacked on at the beginning and the middle of the song and superfluous guitar solos. Besides that meaningless embellishment the song is left almost completely unchanged except for annoying guitar pyrotechnics anathematic to Rush thrown into Alex's riffs.

This same formula carries on for every track. The whole spirit of Rush has eluded this band. Instead we have useless fills and solos, keyboards in every single song serving no purpose, and the worst vocals I have ever heard and hope I ever hear. Listening to this album again for this review I can now say I will never listen to this album again. Out of every album I've heard on the archives this is the worst. I mean that.