CARESS OF STEEL

The follow-up to Fly by Night, Caress of Steel, was released just seven months later, in September 1975. Caress of Steel was meant to be Rush's big, breakthrough commercial success, but it suffered from lackluster sales. I love Caress of Steel, but I can understand why it didn't do as well as the band and their label had hoped.

The album opens with three short songs: "Bastille Day" is Rush's last gasp of Zeppelinism, though it is enjoyable; "I think I'm Going Bald" is a goofy, groovy hard rock track; and "Lakeside Park" is forgettable and inoffensive. These songs feel tacked-on, in comparison to the pair of epics that follow.

"The Necromancer" is the more cohesive of the two long tracks, but it has issues. Narration is difficult to integrate unobtrusively, and the frequent, down-pitched narration on this song is distracting. Storytelling through lyrics alone is difficult, so I understand the desire to add context, but the song loses all its momentum during the narrative breaks. Once the band get into the real meat of the song, it's great, featuring some of the best soloing of Lifeson's career. This song is also something of a sequel to "By-Tor and the Snow Dog", with both characters being mentioned in the song's final movement. Continuity between the two is also evident in similar soloing in both songs' midsections.

Where "The Necromancer" felt like one big, cohesive song with pacing issues, "The Fountain of Lamneth"?Caress of Steel's 20-minute closing opus?feels more like six separate songs slammed together. The song's internal divisions all have hard, clear demarcations where the music simply stops for a second or two. Despite its disjointed nature, this song's music is more consistently enjoyable. The melodies are stronger, the riffs are less weird-for-the-sake-of-weird, and arc of the song's drama and intensity makes sense.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2020/04/27/deep-dive-rush/