MOVING PICTURES

This album is the centre point at which to start and get into this band for any newcommer, start with 'Moving Pictures' and work forwards and backwards an album at a time, most new fans may never get into Rush if 'Grace Under Pressure' or even 'A Farewell to kings' was their first taste of the band. 'Moving Pictures' captures a then still young band in their prime, all be it they had matured in music terms like no other band in such a short time (7 years after 'Rush' was released).

Hard to catagorize Rush at the best of times and definately hard to put 'Moving Pictures' in a genre, I think the closest would be to class this album as all of the best bits of their past albums on one record, the best of prog, (The Camera Eye), art rock (Tom Sawyer) and hard rock, (Limelight) and also new wave (Vital Signs) simply Rush at their best, this album had always been my favouritre Rush album, I had to wait for 'Presto' in 1989 for any competition.

Rush were by this stage well known for how great musicians they were, they only got better as the grammy nominated 'YYZ' proves, the songwriting was improving too, my only criticisim I have for Rush is the direction they took after this album to 'Signals' and 'Grace Under Pressure' in my opinion their 2 weakest albums, I understand the progression was partly natural but as Rush said we all have 'Freewill' and the band (mostly Geddy) choose this direction, I only wish we had a real successor to 'Moving Pictures'. But thankfully we were spoiled again with every album from 'Power Windows' onwards, but these albums were a notch below this album with Presto as the only exception.