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Rush - Caress of Steel CD (album) cover

CARESS OF STEEL

Rush

 

Heavy Prog

3.55 | 1431 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

thesleeper72
3 stars Like a boy going through the awkward passage between childhood and adulthood, Caress of Steel shows us the awkward transition between the excellent blues rock of Fly By Night and the excellent prog rock of 2112. I had a hard time rating this album. It was a necessary album in the bands transition. However, looking back on it, it seems that they couldn't quite find their sound yet. Some fans might dismiss this album entirely if it weren't for "Bastille Day", one of Rush's necessary rockers. The album features three rock songs and two long progressive songs.

Nearly everyone agrees that "Bastille Day" deserves the credit it gets. The song is driven by Alex Lifeson's powerful guitar work and it ends with a very melodic guitar passage, almost unexpected given the borderline metal feel the song provides. The next two songs "I Think I'm Going Bald" and "Lakeside Park" often divide fans on whether or not they are good or "just mindless filler". I tend to lean towards the first choice. The former is a somewhat humorous song about growing old featuring some fun guitar solos by Lifeson. The latter is a Led Zeppelin influenced song that is probably the lightest out of the three, but it is still a fun song to listen to.

We now come to the two epics of the album. The first of these is "The Necromancer". The song features spoken word throughout the song. It feels rather strange and out of place, and Rush epics just don't feel right without keyboards or synths. However, Lifeson provides excellent guitar work throughout and a rock section is provided in the song. I'm surprised some didn't just take this part of the song and made it a single song like they did with "2112: Overture/Temple of Syrinx". Overall, it is an enjoyable song and showed the band to be going somewhere.

However, Fountain of Lamneth, which takes up one side of the disc, drags the album down with it. The song represents a side of prog I do not like: Incredibly long songs that have some good ideas, but is incoherent and ultimately uninteresting. It does not matter to me how long a song is. Even if it is thirty minutes long, I will listen to it if it keeps my attention (such as their "Cygnus X-1" epic). The song features primarily acoustic guitars, which I don't have a problem with. However, amidst the random ideas, Rush seems to forget that they are a rock band. Sure there is a drum solo and a couple of repeating electric guitar riffs, but they are washed away in a sea of blandess.

I wanted to give this album four stars, since I enjoyed the first four songs very much. However, Fountain of Lamneth, takes up nearly half the album and is one of the main features of the album. This drags it down two stars (and the Necromancer wasn't perfect either). However, got the lesson they needed when this album did not sell as well as they thought it would. This caused them to focus more, which lead to the creation of five fantastic albums afterwards.

thesleeper72 | 3/5 |

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