Rush recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of their debut album, ‘Rush’, as well as their first tour to promote the album. In honor of such a great memory for this fantastic band I offer my review of Rush:
Prelude to Rush album
The self-entitled album, Rush, released on March 1, 1974 is still my personal favorite Rush albums among all the other great Rush albums. In retrospect, later Rush albums are still absolutely great but there was a different sort of energy to those masterpieces versus ‘Rush’. One of the main reasons why this album’s sound, lyrics and attitude might be slightly unfamiliar to a casual Rush-fan is the fact that Neil Peart was not the drummer on this particular album. Yes, that’s right, for any Rush fans that are reading this now and might be in shock. John Rutsey was the drummer on Rush and he’s clearly got mad-skills as you can hear on the album before leaving the band with complications due to diabetes. John set the bar extremely high and, of course, Neil has proven over the years that he is one of the world’s finest drummers himself but all-due respect to John.
Rush album
This album was the perfect debut that any band could have hoped. It was loud, obnoxious and bold. If there was one word to sum up this debut it would be ‘Sexy’ which is not very Rush-ish these days but this album certainly was that. A song list is listed below and even some of the song titles give you a hint into what I mean by ‘Sexy’.
Source: Wikipedia
| Side one | |||||||||
| Title | Length | ||||||||
| “Finding My Way“ | 5:03 | ||||||||
| “Need Some Love” | 2:16 | ||||||||
| “Take a Friend” | 4:27 | ||||||||
| “Here Again” | 7:30 | ||||||||
| Side two | |||||||||
| Title | Length | ||||||||
| “What You’re Doing” | 4:19 | ||||||||
| “In the Mood“ | 3:36 | ||||||||
| “Before and After” | 5:33 | ||||||||
| “Working Man“ | |||||||||
Rush’ing ‘Till the End
“Take Yourself a Friend, Keep ‘em Till then End, Whether Woman or Man, It Makes you feel so good” is part of the lyrics for song #3 (‘Take a Friend’) on ‘Rush’ and probably accurately represents the great positive overall attitude of this album. The lyrics and sound of Rush are simply majestic, although raw. The song and sounds blend perfectly. ‘Rush’, the album has the highest rating of all time for Steeler Star ratings and the band ‘Rush’ is a required activity to go-see if they are ever near your vicinity.
Overall listening to ‘Rush’ is a great experience. ‘Working Man’ clearly became one of the most popular rock songs of all time but the seven other songs on this album all had similar pedigree. They were worthy as well. This is certainly one of those times where any sort of Music Review does a serious injustice to the power of the music so, therefore, I would just suggest listening to the title track ‘Finding My Way’ and see if this kind of music is of interest to you.
Enjoy and congratulations to Rush on 40+ great years,
Rush Fan
