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Rush - A Farewell to Kings CD (album) cover

A FAREWELL TO KINGS

Rush

 

Heavy Prog

4.34 | 2487 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Sinusoid
Prog Reviewer
5 stars Progressive rock is starting to dwindle in 1977, yet Rush finds a way to produce one of the genre's cornerstones in A FAREWELL TO KINGS. It has many perks that you want out of a prog rock album, only louder and heavier.

The old Rush fan in me would go out of his way to praise this as a masterpiece, but I've since removed my Rush boxer shorts and realized that in prog terms, this is slightly behind the times; I consider 1969-1975 to be the prime era of ''classic'' progressive rock. However, the wild card Rush has is their hard rock roots, and they merge those roots with a healthy dose of progressive rock into one exciting album that only a few have done before successfully.

Prog fans will no doubt look to ''Xanadu'' and ''Cygnus X-1'' as highlights; ''Xanadu'' is certainly a high point in Rush's career where the epic writing came into full fruition here. ''Cygnus X-1'' is a surprisingly catchy thing that alternates complex and simple ideas very well. Everyone is at their prime performance level on both tracks, but it's Lifeson's guitar work that really shines here, especially the haunting end to the last track.

However, my album highlight has to be the title track. Much overlooked by most everyone, this somewhat hidden gem is six minutes of the best you will get out of Rush; beginning with a soft, acoustic introduction, the track then explodes into a mini-epic of sorts and even has some of Geddy's best vocals. The jazzier ''Cinderella Man'' and the quiet ''Madrigal'' aren't quite highlights, but still excellent in their own right. Only ''Closer to the Heart'' is slightly out of place here being the poppier tune that it is.

A FAREWELL TO KINGS represents one of the highlights of Heavy Prog and is one of the finer Rush albums a prog fan can acquire. Geddy's vocals may take time to get used to, but this is an instrumentally and compositionally sound album that would sit very nicely in any prog collection.

Sinusoid | 5/5 |

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