VAPOR TRAILS

After his wife and daughter both died within a year of each other, it seemed as though Neal Peart was simply too shattered to continue with Rush. After a lot of soul-searching and a long road trip, Peart finally felt ready to get back in the saddle and the result was Vapor Trails.

Alas, the original release of the album had an absolutely horrible mix. Nu-metal was hot at the time, which meant that dark and murky production in general was common in hard rock circles in general, and the loudness war had escalated to a ridiculous extent. The end result obscured many of the album's merits under a mass of oversaturated audio and silly gimmicks.

Rush realised the original mix was a bad mistake, however, and that led to the release of a new mix in 2013 - the same year that Marillion released a new mix of Radiation, another turn-of-the-millennium prog album whose original released was blighted by an unfortunate mixing job. And as was the case with Radiation, the rerelease of Vapor Trails turned out to be something of a revelation, revealing an actually pretty decent album which had been obscured by a mixing desk atrocity.

I'm not going to say Vapor Trails is a flat-out groundbreaking classic, but I will say that in the remixed version it's very, very good - perhaps their best since Grace Under Pressure. In the corrected mix, it comes across as a confident development of the general approach of Counterparts and Test For Echo, but enhanced simply by stronger songwriting, and a warmer feeling all over. There's less sense of the excessive artifice which had touched all the albums from Power Windows to Test For Echo, and more sense of a band doing what comes naturally to them.

Perhaps the boys were just thrilled to be working together again, and that joy seeped into the recording process; either way, whatever they were doing differently here worked, it's just that it was disguised for over a decade by the original mix. Shave a star - or even two stars - off this rating if you are considering the original mix, but it's pretty obvious that Rush regard the remix as the canonical version of the album. They aren't wrong there.