Ugh. For Rush’s sophomore effort on Atlantic records, they slid further into mediocrity with more standard hard rock numbers, an unusually bright and bland production, and a general lack of noteworthiness that got them an album that somehow peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200, but failed to do anything interesting musically.

Let’s face it: at this point, Rush stopped selling mass numbers of albums because they were interesting or good, and managed to sell a lot of records because they were Rush records. I’m sure there are many people who would argue that this was the greatest stuff ever, but I’m not one of them. However, there are plenty of completists that will buy anything released by Rush without question.

I won’t deny that the trio was still trying new things and attempting to progress musically. If you look at the albums between Hold Your Fire and Counterparts, there’s sort of a bell curve of writing style where the band wavers, overcorrects, and eventually drops into a good groove. Fortunately, that means Counterparts is excellent. Unfortunately, that means there are many missteps along the way.

One interesting example is an instrumental track, “Where’s My Thing?, Pt. 4: Gangster of Boats Trilogy.” It’s great that the band dipped back to their prog roots and decided to do their first instrumental track since “YYZ.” Unfortunately, it’s a synth-laden, fake-brassy track that’s doesn’t stand out as a feat of technical prowess. Most of the album has the same dynamic; things aren’t catchy, and songs blur into each other, with none of them standing out. The only ultimately memorable songs to me are the opener, “Dreamline,” which has a catchy chorus, and “Heresy,” which is Rush’s “the wall fell down” song (which was a big fad of the time. I blame The Scorpions for this didn’t-age-well trend.)

And then there’s the title track. And the rap. Geddy Lee raps. I don’t even know how to process this. A RAP. Jesus H. Christ on a cross - I mean, I have nothing against rap, and I even own a few records of the genre and can enjoy them, but this is like when your parents try to act cool and learn like one word of youth slang and then use it incorrectly to gain some kind of cred with you. I wish I could just pretend this whole album never happened.

Anyway, I have a minor conspiracy theory about how such a shoddy album could chart so well: RTB was the first Rush release in the Nielsen SoundScan era. Prior to SoundScan’s adoption on March 1, 1991, the weekly Billboard 200 chart was assembled together from vague statistics reported manually by store owners based on inventory changes and normalized with secretive statistical voodoo. But starting in May of 1991, actual barcode scans in stores with computerized point-of-sale systems were directly used to measure performance on Billboard charts.

This led to a strange shift; instead of being based on a weighting of store owners’ perceived sales figures, they were based on actual sales figures. This meant that some albums that you wouldn’t think were chartable would show up and rate high. The first #1 album on the post-SoundScan Billboard 200 was a Michael Bolton album. Heavy metal albums, which traditionally were not well-reported, suddenly tore up the charts. Skid Row’s second album, Slave to the Grind, entered the charts at #1, and then rapidly fell back off, because a surge of people bought it during a single week. And remember when Guns ‘N Roses had the big Use Your Illusion midnight purchase rush? Actually, pretty much every big band started having those Tuesday night come-in-at-midnight store events, mostly because it was a good way to juice SoundScan stats. (It was also a good way to get people to line up to buy a crappy Guns ‘N Roses album of cover tunes, but that’s another review.)

Amazon and iTunes have similar rating systems, in which titles with large purchase numbers at very specific time periods skew statistics. A perfect example of this in 2008 was when Stephen Colbert urged all of his fans to buy his Christmas album on iTunes at one specific time. This threw off the system and unseated a much larger-selling Kanye West album from the top position. So when you have a band with tons of loyal fans that all rush out at midnight on a certain day to buy the band’s new album sight unseen, it just might chart very well, even if it sucked total shit and had Geddy Lee doing a god damned rap in one song.

I remember this album coming out, and being excited that a new Rush song was on the radio, but I didn’t hurry to the record store and wait in line all night for this one. In fact, I think I listened to it once at a record store and decided to pass on it. Much later, I picked up a used copy, listened to it a few times, and must have sold it back, because I had to go out and buy another copy on iTunes to write this review. Maybe the reason I never got into this album, aside from its contents, was that so much else was going on at that point in music. A ton of excellent metal albums came out around then (Entombed - Clandestine; Carcass - Necroticism…; Death - Human; Motorhead - 1916) and this got lost in the shuffle.

Rating: 4

MARS stands for MacAlpine Aldridge Rock Sarzo, and it’s a fine little example of only-in-the-Eighties guitar rock, courtesy of Shrapnel records. They’re best known as the small indie label that put out guitar super-genius Tony MacAlpine’s first album out to rave reviews. In 1986, they gave him a shot to do something different and put together a “super-group,” playing some more rock-oriented tunes, rather than his instrumental and highly progressive guitar-oriented stuff. He rounded out the band with Ozzy drummer Tommy Aldridge and Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo, as well as the somewhat unknown crooner Robert Rock. (And no, it’s not that Bob Rock.)

Turns out this lineup happened almost at the last minute. The band was simply called Driver at first, and Craig Goldy was the original guitar player, but he left the band to go play with Ronnie James Dio. Sarzo recruited MacAlpine, and they wrote music with Aldridge and later recruited Rock for the singer slot. This album came after Macalpine’s solo debut album on Shrapnel, an all-instrumental guitar number closer to the Vai/Satriani school of thought, so this was a big shift for his talents.

Project: Driver, at least in structure, is nothing more than Whitesnake-ripoff cock-rock. It’s not the kind of hair metal that slutty girls swoon over, and it’s not technically interesting enough to get away with it, like Dokken or something. MacAlpine’s guitar work is decent, but the straight-up, three-minutes-forty, verse-chorus-solo-verse songs don’t let him show anything off. Plus the production tries to go for a Poison/Motley Crue sound on a garage band budget. It’s not tinny as much as it is compressed. Add on top of it that this Rob Rock guy sings like an overweight Long Island dude in leather pants belting out some Bad Company karaoke after a few too many beers.

There are a couple of “theme” songs, like “Nostradamus,” which are so Spinal Tap in quality, you’d expect the band to pop out of pods on stage to those numbers. Oddly enough, the more sex-oriented tunes like “Fantasy” and “Slave To Your Touch” are actually a bit better, because Rock’s vocals seem more convincing, and the songs bound forward a bit better when they’re more conventional and not trying to re-live Stonehenge. (Oh, in the fadeout to the latter, however, Rock squeals “you can’t ex-cape!” Doh!) The album ends with two songs, “I Can See It In Your Eyes” and “You and I,” that I would never, EVER want to listen to in a car for fear of stopping at a light with my window down and someone pulling up next to me.

Here’s the kicker, though. As bad as this album is, I really LIKE it. I don’t know if it’s a shared memory experience thing, or if it’s that some of the songs are really catchy. I also really enjoyed MacAlpine’s solo stuff, and this dovetailed nicely because of his distinctive guitar sound. For whatever reason, I always found this tape sneaking back into the player, of course when nobody was around. And I was very excited when I finally hunted down a CD version of the 35-minute classic. (My tape, with white case, actually had black oil stains on it from listening to it when working on my old car.) Anyway, I don’t expect one god damned person on this earth to understand why I like this or to like it themselves, but it’s one of many guilty pleasures, and I still like listening to it.

Rating: 7

It was all the rage at the time. It was what made Winger into a hit-producing machine. It was simple: take a couple of total shredmaster ultra wizards on guitar and bass, slap an obscure drummer behind them, and put a proficient yet largely unknown guy up front on mic and leather pants duty. But instead of launching through a Yngwie-like solo-fest that shows us all that you can hit every note on the fretboard four times a measure, take a big step back and write some laid-back numbers with a little feeling, and some good catchy melody. Put in a couple of good solos, have at least two or three ballads for the couples, but make it cool enough so that the Steve Vai types who are into total minor mode domination on the six-(or seven) string will still pick up a copy. Not only did this work well for Winger, but it was pretty much the formula of the Hagar-era Van Halen, too.

Mr. Big followed this formula after ex-Talas bassist Billy Sheehan finished his duties with David Lee Roth. (If you need more Van Halen connections here, it should be mentioned that Talas used to open for VH back in the day, and there was talk that Sheehan would replace Michael Anthony in the early 80s, which would have been pretty weird.) Sheehan is often called the Eddie Van Halen of the bass, as he does a lot of crazy ten-fingered tapping stuff on the four-string, including techniques like playing a chord progression on three strings while also tapping out a leading line on the other. It’s all total guitar geek shredder stuff, except on a lower register. Sheehan hooked up with Paul Gilbert, who is a bit of a guitar god himself. He started touring with bands when he was only 15, then went to GIT in California and after graduating, he immediately got an instruction spot. (He taught the guitar weirdo Buckethead, among others.) His band Racer X put out a couple of albums on Shrapnel records with a very high “whoa” factor, and he appeared in about every third page of Guitar Player magazine for most of the mid-eighties. Their four-piece was rounded out by semi-unknowns Eric Martin on vocals and Pat Torpey on drums.

The eleven-track self-titled debut from the band shows a good mix of proficiency and playability that demonstrates that you don’t need to blast through with super-fast drum beats and constant soloing to make songs work. That said, there are some faster numbers here. (I mean faster as in “not prom songs,” not faster as in Slayer.) The opening song “Addicted to That Rush” starts with Sheehan’s bass burbling at high speed like a nest of bumblebees before Gilbert jumps in and they duel lines a bit until the drums crash in and the song starts. The two work well in their ability to play together; there are parts where they are so synchronized, it sounds like one huge chord reaching from low registers to high, instead of two people playing their own lines. The album does sound slightly thin, but the bass has a very sharp and unique tone, not as high as a guitar, but almost like the sound of Stanley Clarke’s weird experimental solo basses that are tuned an octave higher.

There’s not much to be said about the vocals or lyrics on the songs. The lyrics, while bad, aren’t as bad as the way Martin has a tendency to whine or go nasal on certain things to make the lines seem really stupid. There’s a part where the lyrics are “A lover’s crime and punishment / Is do this, do that and put your eyes / Back in your head / Let’s play house instead.” Okay, that’s pretty stupid, just reading it. But the way he bunches words and emphasizes it makes you wish the verse was over and they’d go to the next solo.

Overall, each of the songs has its own groove, and they alternate between taking things easy (“Big Love”) and slightly rockier bits (“Rock & Roll,” “Merciless”). There’s one zippier song that’s my favorite on that end, “How Can You Do What You Do,” which almost seems like it was written as the “video” song, and I could see Eric Martin on a stage with no audience, wearing his leather pants and a bandana or two, singing into a large industrial fan. (They probably wouldn’t have the fan blowing trash around, like Skid Row or Motley Crue, though.)

Did I mention ballads? There are two. The second one is total cheese, called “Anything for You.” I discovered by accident that if you played this at double speed, it makes a snappy little jazz fusion number. But at regular tempo, hearing Martin dredge out “aaaaanything for youuuuu” is a bit painful. However, the other ballad, a Sheehan-penned piece called “Had Enough,” is quite good. It starts with just bass, and then adds in some very casual guitar before building up on the drums and going into the song full-steam. It’s a breakup song, and I’d be a liar if I said this thing wasn’t in my walkman constantly after my first couple of big post-dumping depresso-fests. It’s a very touching little song, because it stays laid-back and really features how Sheehan’s bass can carry a song without blowing up into full-on bassmaster lines.

Oh, and since this was the era for it, there is a “bonus track.” It’s included on both the tape and the CD, so I guess that doesn’t make it much of a bonus, but it’s a “live” track called “30 Days in the Hole.” I say “live” because this band formed in about ten seconds and rushed into the studio, so I don’t remember them playing any arenas before they recorded their album. I don’t know the origin of the song, but it sounds like maybe it’s an old cover. [It’s a Humble Pie cover, dumbass.] I always remember it though because when I arrived at college in the fall of 89 and I sat down at a computer for the first time, it required me to create a password with at least 12 characters and two of them non-letters, and “30daysinthehole” was the first thing that came to me. So for at least a semester or two, I always thought of Mr. Big when I checked my email, long after I got bored of this album.

This album’s not bad, and it still holds up to me. It was not their most popular work - I guess right after this, they did another album that got some airplay and had a couple of prom ballads. I never checked out any of their other stuff before they dropped off the earth (actually, they are, predictably, HUGE in Japan, and recorded a bunch of Japan-only albums) but I always had a sweet spot for this album, so I still find myself going back and giving it a listen.

Rating: 8

On the coattails of the wildly successful 2112, Rush decided to put out a quad-side, triple-gatefold live LP, named with a Shakespeare reference, recorded in their home town. This began a cycle where the band would release four studio albums, then bookend the era with a double live album. This time around, the band summarized their early career, an era that began as a bar band belting out Led Zeppelin-esque music, and progressing to a full-on art-rock band, complete with long-form concept pieces.

This album was recorded in historic Massey Hall in Toronto, a 2700-seat venue with a vivid past, serving as the location of classic acts from Charlie Parker to Frank Zappa. Terry Brown and crew captured their June 11-13 1976 shows on tape, from the tour supporting 2112, restructuring the order of their set into an hour-and-ninteen-minute series of two LPs’ worth of live tunes.

The older, hard rock side of Rush is solidly displayed here. They start by rocking out “Bastille Day” and then pounding through live versions of stuff like “Anthem” and “Something For Nothing,” plus medleys, like starting with “Fly By Night” and segueing into “In the Mood.” All of this shows Alex’s ability to plow through the rhythm and then switch to a screaming bluesy solo and back, without the aid of overdubs or a rhythm guitarist behind him. This is helped with Geddy’s bass, which is chunky and follows the guitar well.

If you’re looking for more in the prog vein, there is a truncated version of the first side of their latest album at the time, 2112, which removes the “Oracle” and shortens the “Discovery” sub-songs, clocking in at just over 15 minutes. (And a minor gripe is that this is tracked on the CD as a single song, so you can’t skip around easily, which sucks, because sometimes I’m in the mood to just jump to “Grand Finale” and rock that part out.) On the tail of that is a twelve-minute rendition of “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”, which is pretty faithful to the album version.

A big reason I like this album more than the other Rush live albums is there’s a lot more of the human element shown here; it’s probably the most honest of the live albums. The band isn’t spot-on perfect here, which is good. You can see the holes where overdubs weren’t compensated with walls of Taurus synth and triggered MIDI and other sampled wizardry. They got around the limitations the old-fashioned way: by improvising, cutting corners, and making it sound good. Add to this that Massey Hall isn’t a huge place. I myself am by no means a talented musician, but in college, I played bass (for one gig) for a band that played in a sold-out hall twice the size of this one. For me to think of Rush playing in a theater half that size boggles my mind. And you can hear it; There isn’t constant audience noise. For some numbers, the crowd is quiet, and then waits for the end of the song to applause. This is much more appealing to me than a giant arena where people are cheering for every second because Rush is the biggest thing in the world, or a “live” album recorded in a studio with a constant crowd sound dubbed in from a stock audio reel. This small venue dynamic shows them as a working band, just starting, still struggling. And I like that.

The small things add up, too. A few times, Alex gets a touch of feedback in places where it didn’t sound planned. Neil fills in with his cowbell here and there, and sounds like he’s having fun on the set. When they go from the slow to the heavy part of “In the End”, Geddy counts off with “one, two, buckle my shoe”. There are a lot of little fills and runs at the ends of songs that shows that they’re still organic.

Probably my favorite bit is the medley of “Working Man” and “Finding My Way,” which completely rocks out both songs, and adds a trademark drum solo by “the professor on the drum kit”. I have to say, compared to later stuff, you can tell Neil is still building his chops here. This is a pre-electronic, pre-trigger, pre-MIDI drum solo, nothing but skins and a little bit of cowbell.

A minor nit: the old CD had to clip the quad-side album at 75 minutes, and that meant dropping “What You’re Doing,” and also dropping this bit of chatter between the band members as they ran offstage and then slammed a door behind them. This got fixed in the 1997 remaster/reissue.

Overall, this is a nice time capsule and a great way to end the early hard rock era of the band. From here, things got a lot more proggy and the band left behind the desire to be another Zep clone. But it’s still fun to go back to this every once in a while and see a recap of what the band did for those first four albums.

Rating: 8

Most people who even know anything about Grim Reaper only know them from an episode of _Beavis and Butthead_that savagely made fun of a video of their most popular tune, “See You in Hell,” with one of the cartoon duo saying that they looked like a band you’d see at the county fair. If I was a typical metal fan that required total allegiance to bands that weren’t good but were still an “influence” or whatever, I would have been pretty upset by that cartoon. But, I’m not stupid like that, so I thought it was pretty damn funny, because face it: for the most part, Grim Reaper really did suck.

I actually did listen to these guys back in the day, mostly because a friend of mine made a mix tape called “Heavy Metal Hell” and it had a cut from each of the English band’s three albums. That made me rush out and buy their third (and last) album, Rock You to Hell, which made me think that even though they weren’t very original with their song titles, they sounded okay. This was also at a point when I was buying a lot of thrash metal, and maybe in comparison, it didn’t seem that bad. I lost or sold the tape a year or two later, and didn’t think much of it for a long time.

When trying to buy back a lot of my old favorites on CD, I picked up this compilation, which offered 17 cuts on one disc. As far as representing their three albums, there are most of the basics here, like “See You In Hell,” “Fear No Evil,” “Rock You To Hell,” “Waysted Love,” and “Suck It And See.” (ugh…) As you can see, these guys were not exactly prolific in the ability to come up with neat song titles. Maybe if they would have taken a note from Carcass and bought a medical thesaurus, their career would have lasted a bit longer.

Upon listening to the tracks, I really wonder why I ever liked these guys. As far as the basics, these guys are a typical NWOBHM-influenced early thrash band, with a very standard chorus-verse-solo-repeat style, nothing more. Their lead singer, Steve Grimmett, mostly belts out a bad falsetto that sounds like someone trying to imitate Don Dokken, although he occasionally does some “sexy” homoerotic grunts and “uhs” in various places. And Grimmett isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want up front in spandex, thrusting his codpiece against the mic stand. I guess other English frontmen like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickenson or even Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott have been able to front a band with an equal lack of physical glam, but it just doesn’t work here. Maybe I liked this band so much in the 80s because back then, MTV didn’t play their videos, and I just didn’t know how Spinal Tap-eque they looked.

As for the actual songs, some of them are surprisingly similar, almost like they found a good melody and structure and just re-used it over and over. “See You in Hell” and “Now or Never” have such similar introductions, I thought my CD was messed up for a minute. Older stuff like “See You in Hell” sounds almost like a demo in quality, very compressed and tinny. They predictably have the cliched heavy metal “rain and thunder” intro on the song “Let the Thunder Roar”, and “Final Scream” has this weird intro with a screaming girl and a synthesized voice that is possible the worst King Diamond rip-off ever.

That said, some of cuts from their third album, Rock You to Hell, aren’t bad. I think they got the production figured out by then, with a much thicker sound, and the lead guitar work is more Dokken-eque, with good leads and tappy emphasis stuff here and there, but without totally showing off. The title cut, plus “Lust For Freedom” and “Waysted Love” are particularly decent metal from 1987. Grimmett’s vocals aren’t howling or shrieking, and although it’s not exactly Rob Halford or anything, they’re a dot or two ahead of the curve. I can’t ignore their song “Suck it and See”, though. Aside from the fact that this is a completely hilarious yet stupid song title, the actual song itself is pretty bad. You’d think with a title like that, it might be some sort of brutal, sexist theme song, like a thrashier version of “Ram it Down.” Instead, it’s this half-speed, swingy number that makes absolutely no sense.

In retrospect, I probably should have listened to these songs online somewhere and realized that it wasn’t worth having the first two albums, then bought the third and called it a day. It’s sad that a 17-song collection by a band that only had 26 published songs could actually not have two or three songs that I really wanted to hear. It’s even more sad that those 26 songs would probably fit on a CD with 40 minutes to spare. I think this whole thing is an exercise on how to not put together a collection.

Rating: 4