S&A (Critic Review)
Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 10:34 am
Jul 05, 2007 (Newsday - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX)
-- Rush's concert featured everything you'd expect from a progressive rock band of 1970s vintage: a laser light show, fireballs, prodigious riffage, sci-fi keyboards. It would have been an exercise in nostalgia but for one thing: Rush just released a new album, "Snakes & Arrows" (Atlantic), and it debuted at an impressive No. 3 on the Billboard charts.
It didn't sell a ton of copies -- few albums do anymore -- but it proved a point: People, especially older white guys, still like rock. In fact, they're desperate for it, given the mix of hip-hop, R&B and TV show pop that dominates the Top 40. There simply aren't many bands today that can inspire the average dude to break out his air-guitar -- or, in Rush's case, his air-drums.
So Rush's three-hour, 27-song set became one big guys' night, with all the fist-pumping music, goofy humor and stoned philosophizing that have made the band an enduring favorite. There were in-jokes galore, including video appearances from the "South Park" kids and Rush's fellow Canadians, the fictional Bob and Doug McKenzie. And the stage featured the usual inexplicable appliances, this time three "Henhouse" brand rotisserie ovens filled with glistening chickens. (At one point, a fellow in a chef's hat spent a few minutes basting them.)
Now in their early 50s, Rush's three famously gifted musicians -- drummer Neil Peart, guitarist Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee on vocals, bass and keyboards -- still know how to build a symphony's worth of sound. They're also surprisingly spry: Lee and Lifeson often criss-crossed the stage and occasionally faced off. And Peart, perhaps rock's best-respected drummer, delivered his solo on a rotating kit, switching between rock, jazz and industrial styles during the new instrumental track "Malignant Narcissism."
Rush played a total of nine new songs, including the singles "Far Cry" and "Spindrift." This wasn't the band's best material: It lacks the Zeppelin-esque heft of earlier tracks such as "A Passage to Bangkok" or the pop sensibility of '80s-era favorites like "Tom Sawyer." Still, the new songs dissolved perfectly into the old, creating a fan-pleasing brew of solos, rhythmic shifts and bursts of Arthurian fanfare.
If there's any bone to pick with Rush, it's the portentous lyrics, written chiefly by Peart and sung in Lee's preternatural falsetto. They're no easier to take seriously now ("We can only bow to the here and now in our elemental war," from the new song "The Way the Wind Blows") than they were then ("Science, like nature, must also be tamed with a view towards its preservation," from 1980's "Natural Science"). It must be tough to rock out in service of such mouthfuls; it's a credit to the band that it can.
The show ended with the instrumental "YYZ," a high-energy workout with a hard-rock undercurrent and jazzy, fast-jab solos. Lee's keyboards kicked in, the lasers came on, and nearly every guy in the place went nuts.
RUSH: The progressive rock legends keep moving, if not progressing.
Monday night at Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh.
-- Rush's concert featured everything you'd expect from a progressive rock band of 1970s vintage: a laser light show, fireballs, prodigious riffage, sci-fi keyboards. It would have been an exercise in nostalgia but for one thing: Rush just released a new album, "Snakes & Arrows" (Atlantic), and it debuted at an impressive No. 3 on the Billboard charts.
It didn't sell a ton of copies -- few albums do anymore -- but it proved a point: People, especially older white guys, still like rock. In fact, they're desperate for it, given the mix of hip-hop, R&B and TV show pop that dominates the Top 40. There simply aren't many bands today that can inspire the average dude to break out his air-guitar -- or, in Rush's case, his air-drums.
So Rush's three-hour, 27-song set became one big guys' night, with all the fist-pumping music, goofy humor and stoned philosophizing that have made the band an enduring favorite. There were in-jokes galore, including video appearances from the "South Park" kids and Rush's fellow Canadians, the fictional Bob and Doug McKenzie. And the stage featured the usual inexplicable appliances, this time three "Henhouse" brand rotisserie ovens filled with glistening chickens. (At one point, a fellow in a chef's hat spent a few minutes basting them.)
Now in their early 50s, Rush's three famously gifted musicians -- drummer Neil Peart, guitarist Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee on vocals, bass and keyboards -- still know how to build a symphony's worth of sound. They're also surprisingly spry: Lee and Lifeson often criss-crossed the stage and occasionally faced off. And Peart, perhaps rock's best-respected drummer, delivered his solo on a rotating kit, switching between rock, jazz and industrial styles during the new instrumental track "Malignant Narcissism."
Rush played a total of nine new songs, including the singles "Far Cry" and "Spindrift." This wasn't the band's best material: It lacks the Zeppelin-esque heft of earlier tracks such as "A Passage to Bangkok" or the pop sensibility of '80s-era favorites like "Tom Sawyer." Still, the new songs dissolved perfectly into the old, creating a fan-pleasing brew of solos, rhythmic shifts and bursts of Arthurian fanfare.
If there's any bone to pick with Rush, it's the portentous lyrics, written chiefly by Peart and sung in Lee's preternatural falsetto. They're no easier to take seriously now ("We can only bow to the here and now in our elemental war," from the new song "The Way the Wind Blows") than they were then ("Science, like nature, must also be tamed with a view towards its preservation," from 1980's "Natural Science"). It must be tough to rock out in service of such mouthfuls; it's a credit to the band that it can.
The show ended with the instrumental "YYZ," a high-energy workout with a hard-rock undercurrent and jazzy, fast-jab solos. Lee's keyboards kicked in, the lasers came on, and nearly every guy in the place went nuts.
RUSH: The progressive rock legends keep moving, if not progressing.
Monday night at Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh.
