Rush are another band beloved by my proggy housemates from university, and I realised that listening to these guys, ELP, Yes, and so on were nice nostalgia trips as they reminded me of some good friends that I haven’t seen in a long time as much as they were about hearing the music again.
It’s been a while since I’ve heard any Rush as well – I can call to mind some bits and pieces mainly from Farewell To Kings, Hemispheres, and Moving Pictures, but although I know I used to listen to this album it was only the refrain “We are the priests, of the Temple of Syrinx” that immediately came back to me.
On 2112, Rush decide to go hard or go home on a full-on prog-rock opera; the track 2112 that takes up the entirety of Side One. Side Two, meanwhile, goes for some shorter and more commercial songs, all of which are a lot better than I remember.
The title track is set in a future world ruled by the priests of the Temple of Syrinx, who rule a federation of planets through rigid laws set by computers. The protagonist finds an old guitar in a cave, learns to play it, and then presents it to the Priests, hoping that they will be pleased that he’s found a means for people to make their own music. They aren’t, destroy the guitar, and the protagonist kills himself but not before having a vision of an "Elder Race" returning to Earth to defeat the oppressive regime. The track ends with a battle sequence between the federation and the Elder Race that's a little like Queen's Ogre Battle, a little like Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles Pink Robots.
Lots of things going on here. The first is that 20 minutes really didn’t feel long enough – I've become so inured to lengthy tracks that this seemed brief in comparison. Each segment is good, moving between bombastic rock for the overture to heartfelt acoustic guitar as the protagonist learns how to play, Alex Lifeson imbuing a lot of personality through his playing. Syrinx is a Greek nymph who was turned into reeds in a bid to escape the amorous attentions of Pan, but was turned into a set of pipes by him, thus she’s eternally at his bidding, a mythological figure of captive music. It’s also the part of a songbird’s anatomy that enables it to sing. Thus the Temple of Syrinx, denying the people the right to music, is both ironic and apposite, typical of the kind of dense layering Neil Peart likes to put into his lyrics.
The Side Two tracks are a mix of mostly rock-ish tunes – A Passage To Bangkok is a hippy-trail travelogue visiting all of the drug capitals of the world. Tears is a ballad beautifully sung by Geddy Lee (whose vocals are usually in the high Robert Plant range). Lessons sounded very familiar, but this is perhaps because it sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin’s Ramble On.
The album-closer Something For Nothing evolves into something akin to a chant, with the simple but thought-provoking lyric “You won’t get freedom for free”. Peart was an astonishing drummer, sounding like a man with at least six arms at times, but it was only reading the Wikipedia entries that I realised he was also largely the lyricist as well.
The album-closer Something For Nothing evolves into something akin to a chant, with the simple but thought-provoking lyric “You won’t get freedom for free”. Peart was an astonishing drummer, sounding like a man with at least six arms at times, but it was only reading the Wikipedia entries that I realised he was also largely the lyricist as well.
I liked this a lot more than I remember liking Rush before, which was somewhat – like, but not love. I think the next time they show up on this list is Moving Pictures, which is quite a big step away from the prog elements, but for old times sake I may dig up some of their albums either side of this one for comparison. Bring on By-Tor and the Snow Dog, or Xanadu.
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