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Rush - Exit... Stage Left (VHS) CD (album) cover

EXIT... STAGE LEFT (VHS)

Rush

 

Heavy Prog

4.00 | 145 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Guillermo
Prog Reviewer
4 stars I added this video to the Prog Archives database some years ago. I even can`t remember now when I did it. But finally this week I watched to this video so now I can write a review about it.

"...forever young...".

Well...that is the impression that I have when I listen and even more when I watch to some bands playing after many years on the road. RUSH is one of those bands. And after watching to this video and to their "Grace Under Pressure Tour" video I still have the same impression, because the main audiences of this band were and maybe still are very young people (I could be wrong, but in both videos there are some scenes taken from the point of view of the audiences...and there were a lot of teenagers and maybe a lot of university students among the fans of this band, or even some pre- teenagers too...with maybe some of their parents attending the concerts with them). Well. Anyway, this band is a very good band and even if I am not as young as most of their fans are I still sometimes enjoy listening and watching to a band like RUSH. I listened to the "Exit... Stage Left" live album for the first time in 1983 (when I was 18 years old) and it remained for at least two years among my favourite albums from that period. Maybe it is their best live album and for my taste their period between 1978 and 1984 was their best, at least in Prog Rock terms. The band sounded very well rehearsed, very energetic, very creative, very heavy. Each musician played their instruments very well, with a lot of precision (particularly drummer Neil Peart, one of the best drummers in Rock music). Bassist Geddy Lee was singing very well in those years and also was playing bass guitar and keyboards and bass pedals, and some rhtyhm guitar (in "Xanadu"), and even controlling the keyboard sequences and playing some keyboard parts using pedals, helped a bit by Alex Lifeson. Lifeson still is a very heavy guitarist, but he sometimes used some acoustic guitars (on the first part of "The Trees" and in "Closer to the Heart", this last song being one of the few songs from the band on which the lyrical themes are not about "modernity", science fiction or technology, themes on which i am not very interested now, but maybe are very interesting for their fans).

So, this video is still very enjoyable, despite the images are not very good. But the sound is good. I think that the performances of the songs are not the same as in the album, or maybe some of them were overdubbed in the recording studio or mixed differently. Anyway, this video is a very good companion to the album, and even has some songs which were not included in the album ("In the End", for example, is one of my favourites from their early seventies period). The only thing that I did not like from this video was the omission of Peart`s drums solo in "YYZ" which is presented in an edited form. But they included "The Trees", "Xanadu" and "Free Will", three very good songs which are among my favourites from their repertoire.

Guillermo | 4/5 |

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