POWER WINDOWS

The beginning of the great decline. I'm pretty much a fan of everything RUSH from the non-progressive hard rockin' debut album to the wonderful synth rock incarnations of SIGNALS and GRACE UNDER PRESSURE. However, this album percolates into my attention span simply because it is RUSH. If this was any lesser musical entity I wouldn't have the time of day to even entertain this mediocrity. Not saying this this is a horrible album as evidenced by my 3 star rating but geez, once you've gone to the musical heights that RUSH achived with many albums in the previoius ten years, how in the world do they possibly think this is an acceptable album even if they want to go the synth route? It simply boils down to the songwriting being extremely substandard and the classic conundrum of making money by appealing to the masses to making music that will appeal to the elite extreme musical literate. Apparantly RUSH felt they paid their dues to the latter and started the attempt to appeal to the former. It's an OK album. I find some of the tracks like "Big Money" and "Manhattan Project" to be acceptable but this album just reeks of mediocrity. A very sad moment indeed considering the artists here.