RUSH - Nashville, TN 04/03/2011 : REVIEW

[dabstudio]

from Nashville Examiner-



The superstar Canadian progressive rock group Rush performed at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena on Sunday, April 3, 2011 as part of the North American leg of a tour dubbed the Time Machine. The show featured a diverse cross-section of the group's 40-year career, as well as the entirety of its Moving Pictures album performed live for the first time.

Although the group has rarely (until quite recently) received any critical accolades outside of instrumental magazines, and in fact has been much lampooned by mainstream critics across the decades, the music of Rush actually holds up far better over time than that of most of its contemporaries. Sunday evening's performance was very well-paced and allowed the band members to do what they do best, which is play very difficult music extremely well.

Vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee, drummer/lyricist Neil Peart and guitarist Alex Lifeson demonstrated over and over again why their die-hard fans have given them such devotion over such a long period of time. The band's strength lies in the very thing that many critics probably see as its greatest weakness, which is its complete unwillingness - or inability - to change and follow trends. That's not to say that Rush hasn't incorporated various contemporary influences here and there, but always in such an unmistakable way that there's no doubt, no matter what era of the band's long career, that what you're hearing could only possibly be Rush.

No other band sounds anything like it, and the band can sound no other way. If you like it, you probably love it and if you don't, you probably hate every second of it, but that's the very thing that has allowed Rush to remain a perpetual cult band while still having enormous popular success. Since the band has never really been in style, it can never really go out of style, either.

For a band that is perceived so seriously, the show opened with an unexpectedly funny video that launched the concept of the Time Machine. Rush launched straight into "The Spirit of Radio," one of its most recognizable songs, in a performance that immediately made it apparent that the band's greatest strength in concert is in its instrumental ability. Obviously the members of Rush are some of the better individual players in rock music, but Geddy Lee's voice has always been an acquired taste, and from the very first song he appeared to experience vocal strain in trying to reproduce older songs in their unnaturally high original keys, with mixed results.

The second song, "Time Stand Still," also saw Lee struggling vocally before settling into a more appealing natural, far-less-screechy range with "Presto." "Working Them Angels" was a standout of the first set, as was a new song entitled "BU2B (Brought up to Believe)," which proved that some classic rock bands actually can and do continue to produce new material that's every bit as good as their past. Lee managed to pull off the higher parts in "Freewill" more or less like the record, and the first set closed with an excellent rendition of "Subdivisions".

The second set kicked off with yet another humorous video before Rush launched into Moving Pictures with "Tom Sawyer," which predictably drew the largest audience reaction of the night. There's a reason Moving Pictures is considered such a timeless album, and overall that material came off better than the first set. "YYZ" provided the instrumental high point of the night, and after finishing Moving Pictures Rush performed another new song, "Caravan."