HOLD YOUR FIRE

Hold Your Fire isn't exactly a return to form, although Rush more effectively merges their progressive sensibilities and their pop ambitions than they had two years earlier on Power Windows. "Mission" and "Lock and Key" are the best songs here, while "Second Nature," "Time Stand Still," and "Turn the Page" aren't bad.

As expected, bassist Geddy Lee and drummer Neil Peart are at the top of their respective games, while guitarist Alex Lifeson is his usual solid self, particularly on "Mission." The production is also good, although I prefer the sound of the next two albums, Presto and Roll the Bones.

Hold Your Fire suffers, though less acutely, from the song-quality issues that beset Power Windows; there's a lot of "blah" on this album. As I said of Power Windows, the best two songs on Hold Your Fire are also on the live A Show of Hands - - although in this case, "Lock and Key" didn't appear on the Show of Hands CD, apparently only having been included on the laserdisc (it's not on my VHS copy). Anyway, that live version of "Mission" is even better than the original, and A Show of Hands also includes good versions of "Time Stand Still" and "Turn the Page."

Of course, all of this makes Hold Your Fire less essential than it might have been otherwise. Although it's a bit of an improvement over Power Windows, I'm giving it the same rating - - two stars - - for mostly the same reasons: the compositional quality is too low to recommend to the average "prog rock" fan.

(P.S.: This was the first Rush cassette I owned, and for years the esteem in which I held Hold Your Fire was a bit too high. A few years ago, when I started using the itunes star-rating feature to create "smart" playlists, I realized that there were really only two songs here that were worthy of a "best-of" Rush list.)